Benjamin Wilcox House

The Benjamin Wilcox House was built to plans drawn by local builder George Chalmers, with construction carried out by Chalmers, aided by Wilcox's sons Edward and Sylvester and by his grandson Joseph. Wilcox's sons were local carpenters. Wilcox had been born in 1796 in New York City. He and his family joined the goldseekers in California, finally settling on San Justo Rancho in the early 1850s. When the Rancho was sold in 1855, Wilcox purchased approximately ten acres of land from General José Castro, and erected this house on the west side of the Alameda. In the context of San Juan Bautista, where architectural styles run the gamut from the Spanish period Mission, through Mexican period adobes, through most of the major nineteenth century eclectic revival styles, to the styles of the first two decades of the twentieth century, the Benjamin Wilcox House is the only Gothic Revival Style structure. As the sole representative of this style in the local context, this structure occupies an important niche in portraying the stylistic development of the built environment. Integrity of location, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association are relatively intact, integrity of design has been compromised to a small degree by the alterations previously described in Item 7, while integrity of setting has been compromised by land-use changes and location of nearby State Highway 156 expressway. The house has a peripheral relation to the Gold Rush, which drew Benjamin Wilcox to California where, like most, he found his livelihood far from the gold fields. Its main significance lies, however, in its architectural qualities: it represents a type, period, and method of construction, and may be considered the work of a local master.