The Irvine Ranch (The Huntington Library Classics) - Softcover

Cleland, Robert Glass

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0873280156 ISBN 13: 9780873280150

Publisher: Huntington Library Press, 2003

Synopsis

The Irvine Ranch in Orange County is one of the largest properties remaining from California’s Rancho Era. In 1952 the Huntington Library first published the history of this gigantic ranch—from the days of the Gabrielino Indians, through the rule by Spain and Mexico, to the ownership and administration by four generations of the Irvine family. The ranch was a combination of three large land grants that went, wholly or in part, into the making of the Irvine property.

Dr. Cleland tells the history of these grants and provides reproductions of old maps and portraits of early owners. Using ranch records and many other sources, Cleland combines sound historical scholarship with a high degree of literary skill to tell the story of the ranch in the larger setting of the history of the region and the state. An Epilogue by Robert V. Hine describes the changes that have taken place since the book was first published, and tells of the long-range plans for light industry, residential and commercial use of the land, and for a University of California campus.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Glass Cleland (1885–1957) was the author or editor of numerous books dealing with the history of California and Mexico.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Native and Spaniard The Spaniards began the colonization of California with the establishment of a royal presidio at San Diego in July 1769. On the 14th of that month, "the day of the seraphic doctor San Buenaventura," Don Gaspar de Portola, commander in chief of the expedition, and a company of trail-hardened friars, leather-jacket soldiers, muleteers, servants, and Indian neophytes left the infant settlement for the far-off, half-mythical port of Monterey. Two weeks later, while encamped on the banks of a tree-lined stream, the company experienced four such "horrifying" earthquakes in a single day that it seemed appropriate to Father Juan Crespi, one of the friars of the expedition, to call the shallow watercourse the River of the Sweet Name of Jesus of the Earthquakes. Out of respect for St. Anne, the Mother of the Virgin, however, the hard-bitten soldiers, Crespi's companions, named the stream El Rio de Santa Ana, and by that name the river is still known.

Edition details

• Publisher: Huntington Library Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0873280156
• ISBN 13: 9780873280150
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 180