When the Santa Barbara Foundation undertook seismic reinforcement at the Hill-Carrillo Adobe in 1992, a deposit of historical materials was encountered below one of the offices This part of downtown Santa Barbara was once on the periphery of Chinatown. The removal of a concrete slab exposed a shaft with an average diameter of 5.9 feet, filled with Chinese artifacts, and the potential importance of the discovery was recognized. The fill was removed down to 16 feet, with as many as nineteen oversize cartons of cultural material recovered from each one foot of digging. In 1995 the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation transferred eighty-two barrels of cultural mater­ial to the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California for analysis and curation in Los Angeles. The rock-lined fea­ture was identified as a well and tentatively correlated to the structure depicted on the 1892 Sanborn map, about 36 feet in back of the adobe.

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