Captain Bezer Simmons Purchases Coronado for $1,000

On December 23, 1846, during the height of the Mexican-American War, American merchant ship captain Bezer Simmons executed one of the most remarkable real estate purchases in California history. For the sum of $1,000 in silver coin, Simmons purchased the entire 4,185-acre Coronado peninsula from Don Pedro Carrillo.

Simmons commanded the trading vessel Magnolia, homeported in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Having arrived in San Diego harbor while Commodore Robert F. Stockton’s naval forces occupied the town, Simmons recognized the strategic value of the expansive sandspit guarding the bay entrance.

Simmons used the peninsula briefly for grazing livestock, but his sudden death from fever in San Francisco in 1850 threw title to the land into the San Diego probate courts. That legal entanglement initiated decades of contested ownership that kept the island largely wild and unsettled until the late 19th century.