San Juan Capistrano's downtown and Mission San Juan Capistrano stand on the site of the Juaneño village of Acjachema. In 1769 Gaspar de Portola's first Spanish exploratory expedition passed about seven miles east, and in 1775 a site for the seventh California mission was selected three miles east on San Juan Creek. Father Junipero Serra re-dedicated the original mission site in 1776, and two years later it was moved to its present location at what is now Ortega Highway and Camino Capistrano. As the mission prospered, forty Juaneno Indian adobe houses, many with tile roofs, were built in 1794, and thirty-four more were added in 1807 while earlier ones were repaired and remodeled; some extended into what is now Historic Town Center Park. After Mexico's 1821 independence from Spain and the secularization of the missions, Alfred Robinson observed in 1829 that the five or six parallel rows of Janeno homes still looked neat and comfortable although the mission was partly in ruins. In 1841 the pueblo of San Juan Capistrano was commissioned to organize a municipal government and town lots, and Juaneno Indians and Mexican settlers from San Diego petitioned for property, though weak local government led many buildings to fall into ruin. Among important area structures were the Canedo Adobe, granted in 1841 to Jose M. Cañedo and later torn down around 1965; the Blas Aguilar Adobe, formed from Casa Esperanza and Casa Tejada and associated with Alcalde Blas Aguilar in 1848, of which only the Casa Esperanza portion survives today as the only remaining adobe along El Camino Real; and the Burruel Adobe, home and cobbler shop of Thomas Burruel, which was destroyed in the 1970s. On April 19, 1875, Mark Mendelson bought this land and a wood-frame building from Manuel and Paula Garcia for $100 in gold and established the Mendelson Inn, later called the Mendelson Mission Inn, serving stagecoach travelers between Santa Ana and San Diego, visitors to the old mission ruins, and travelers bound for the San Juan Hot Springs. The inn rented rooms for $1.50 to $3.00 a night and became a popular hotel and social center, hosting banquets and balls and lodging visitors connected with the Forster families, Judge Richard Egan, actress Madame Helena Modjeska, Father St. John O'Sullivan, and in 1910 D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, Max Sennet, and others involved in the first movie filmed in San Juan Capistrano. The property also included utility buildings, one for carbide gas lighting and another old Juaneno Indian adobe used for fuel oil storage, as well as a haberdashery, general store, butchering by Ed Mendelson, and livestock raised on site; during floods that washed out bridges on both ends of town, the hotel fed stranded villagers. Three generations of the Mendelson family lived there, and Richard Mendelson, born at the inn in 1910, was recognized as the town patriarch in 1995. Clara Mendelson sold the hotel and property to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles in 1931 for $5000, and the hotel was torn down in 1932.
