James Johnston, a forty-niner from Ohio, established a homestead on this wild, romantic vista of sloping fields and ocean shore in 1853. For his Californiano bride, Petra Maria de Jara, he built a typical eastern saltbox, rare in California and the earliest American home still standing along the coastside of San Mateo County. Its design reached back through the American colonial period to medieval East Anglian architecture, while its handhewn redwood timbers linked it to the past when San Benito, or "Spanish town," consisted of only a few adobes. A small chapel on the second floor and a separate cookhouse reflected the influence of its Spanish mistress and made the transplanted house uniquely Californian. Known as "The White House of Half Moon Bay," it stood at the center of the social and cultural life of its day, and the history of the house and the Johnston family was part of the pioneer period of the American West.