Milpitas Hacienda, Jolon, Monterey County, California
Image © Cal Poly
In addition to the construction on the seaside hilltop at San Simeon, in the late 1920s Hearst commissioned Morgan to design and build a (relatively) small hacienda near the northern boundaries of his ranch. Located near the tiny settlement of Jolon, the Milpitas Hacienda was built to house cowboys, but also served as an oasis for Hearst and the visitors who accompanied him on strenuous horseback tours of his sprawling ranch. To keep the newspaper mogul in touch with his many enterprises, a telephone line was strung along the 36 cowboy camps of the ranch all the way to Jolon, thirty rugged brushand-rattlesnake-filled miles distant from La Casa Grande.
Less than a mile from Morgan's Milpitas hacienda is the Mission San Antonio de Padua. The Mission had been in a state of disrepair following the secularization of the missions, and completely abandoned after 1882. Phoebe Hearst and her son both contributed to the restoration of the historic structure when the drive to preserve California's twenty-one missions became a popular effort at the turn of the twentieth century. In the early 1940s, a great deal of this acreage, including the Milpitas Hacienda, was sold to the U.S. Army, for a training facility called Fort Hunter-Liggett.
