William Heath Davis, a prominent San Francisco merchant born in Honolulu to an American sea captain and a Hawaiian mother of chiefly descent, commissioned this prefabricated saltbox house in 1850 as part of his ambitious but ultimately failed attempt to establish a new town on San Diego Bay. The house arrived in pieces by ship from the East Coast around Cape Horn, one of thousands of knockdown structures manufactured in Maine, Massachusetts, and New York and shipped to California during the Gold Rush when the state had almost no milled lumber but an enormous sudden population. Davis's venture collapsed, the wharf was dismantled for firewood, and the settlement became known as Davis's Folly. Seventeen years later, Alonzo Horton, a Connecticut-born furniture dealer, bought roughly 800 acres of essentially the same land for about 265 dollars and succeeded where Davis had failed, creating New Town and establishing downtown San Diego where it stands today. Horton lived in this house at one point, which is why it carries both names.
The two-story wood frame structure is a classic New England saltbox, a vernacular type entirely foreign to Southern California. The front presents a symmetrical five-bay facade, while a steeply pitched roof slopes long at the rear. Plain clapboard walls sheath the frame, which was designed for disassembly and transport. The house has been moved at least twice from its original location in New Town to its present site.
