“Mr. Gillespie and family occupy the 20 mile house, serving meals for the stage line. They are highly respected and quite an addition to the valley.”
So ran a short piece in the Poway Progress newspaper on May 16, 1896
It was called “20 Mile House” because it was at the halfway point on the stagecoach route between San Diego and Escondido. It stood along the old Poway Grade, the twisting and turning mountain road which was then the sole connection between the city of San Diego and the Poway Valley.
In the early 1900s the grade was rerouted further east. The area where 20 Mile House stood today fronts on Old Pomerado Road. But from at least the days of the Gillespies up through around 1910 or so it was the place where stagecoaches stopped to change horses and passengers and crew got a meal.
The building, which no longer exists, often gets confused with another structure built nearby in the late 1920s, the Big Stone Lodge.
Sources for this post included historic San Diego County newspapers, the archives of the Escondido History Center and the Poway Historical and Memorial Society, and the book Historic Stage Routes of San Diego County by Ellen L. Sweet and Lynne Newell.
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San Diego History Seeker 
Mr. Rossi,
How far from the Old Stone Lodge was the 20 mile house?
Thank you!
Michael Minor,
Ramona
I’ve spoken to several people at the Poway Historical Society and haven’t heard anything more specific than “nearby.” It was as a result of some people describing them as the same building that I did a little digging and found that the Big Stone Lodge wasn’t erected until the late 1920s.
Thanks for your interest.
Hi Mr. Rossi. I found your page while looking for information on the Gillespies in San Diego. Funny enough, I grew up in Rancho Penasquitos, and have been to Poway many times. I appreciate your effort to record and share its history.
I am also a descendant of Takeo Asakawa (he was my great-uncle), who in 1939 was President of the Seinen Kai, a student peacemaker effort at San Diego High School started by my distant cousin Moto Asakawa in 1932. I have a 1939 yearbook from the school with a photograph of the Seinen Kai, and pictured with them is a “Mrs. Gillespie”, and the text reads, in part, “To Mrs. Edna Gillespie goes the credit for piloting the club through the last five years of its existence.”
I’m interested in neighbors who advocated for the Japanese community in San Diego in the early 1940s — as I’m sure you know, my family was sent to internment camps three years after this photograph was taken. It’s made me curious about the Gillespie family, and I wonder if Edna was related to the Gillespies mentioned in your article. I believe she was the same Edna Gillespie who was a founder of the San Diego Soroptimist chapter, and I wonder if her descendants know of this brave work she did.
Hi Erin,
Thank you for your comment, and for your interest in local history. Thanks also for sharing some of your family history. I’ll try to see what I can find out on Edna Gillespie’s life and any possible connections to the proprietors of 20 Mile House.
Thanks again,
Vincent Nicholas Rossi