Don Bernardo Yorba Ranchhouse

The Don Bernardo Yorba Ranchhouse was a large adobe home located in the territory of Alta California, near the Santa Ana River in the city now called Yorba Linda, that consisted of several rooms, and became the center of operations of the original Rancho Cañón de Santa Ana.

History

Don José Antonio Yorba I, 1746-1825, was a settler in Spanish California, then known as the California territory of New Spain. Born in San Sadurni de Noya in Catalonia, Spain, Yorba came to the California territory as a Spanish Army officer with the Gaspar de Portolà Expedition of 1769.

Yorba's original rancho, which he named “Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana”, included the lands where the cities of Olive, Orange, Villa Park, Santa Ana, Tustin, Costa Mesa, Irvine and Santiago stand today.

Among José Antonio's children, Bernardo Yorba I (1801-1858) accumulated additional territories for the family's massive cattle herd business, which produced cowhides for leather goods and tallow for soap and candles, that were traded with New England merchants who sailed around the horn from Boston to California's sea ports.

Don Bernardo introduced irrigation agriculture, utilizing the Santa Ana River near his ranchhouse, which was amongst the largest in Alta California.

Juan Pablo Grijalva, a Spanish soldier who came to California with the De Anza expedition, was the original petitioner for the lands that became known as the "Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana". He died before the grant was approved and the lands went to his son-in-law, Jose Antonio Yorba and his grandson, Juan Pablo Peralta.

Throughout the early 1800s, the integrated peoples of Alta California, known as "Californios", lived a pastoral life, and enjoyed the benefits of a thriving economy.

Mexican American War

During the outset of the Mexican-American war, several defensive battles in 1846 and '47 were fought and Alta California was ultimately ceded to the United States in 1847 by signing the Treaty of Cahuenga. Of the land grants established by Spain, and confirmed by the Mexican government after 1823, the Yorba rancho lands were amongst the few to be preserved intact, due, in part, by marriages to American immigrants.

American Integration

One of Don Bernardo’s daughters, Ramona, married Benjamin Davis Wilson, an American trapper from Tennessee, who came to the territory to hunt grizzly bear in the area now called "Big Bear Lake" in the San Bernardino Forrest. Wilson, who is the grandfather of General George S. Patton Jr, began working as a vaquero, and received as a wedding dowry, the Rancho Jurupa from Don Bernardo, which would become the communities of today’s Riverside and San Bernardino counties. Wilson was prominent in the development of the new US State of California, eventually helped in the settling of the towns of Pasadena, San Gabriel and San Marino in Los Angeles County.

Throughout this American and Mormon migration period, descendents of the Yorba's continued to marry into other Spanish families including; the Grijalva's, Perralta's, Sepulveda's, Carrillo's and Dominquez's, who also married and granted lands to Americans to attempt preservation of their possessions. Many of today's recognizable American names in California, including the Kraemers, Glassels, Chapmans and Irvine's, married into these Spanish Californian families. In the early twentieth century, Samuel Kraemer, who had married Angelina, a direct Yorba descendent, tore down the historic Don Bernardo Yorba Ranchhouse of the original Rancho San Antonio, after the new American town of Yorba Linda refused to accept it or preserve it.

References

*Beers, Henry Putney, (1979). "Spanish & Mexican records of the American Southwest : a bibliographical guide to archive and manuscript sources", Tucson : University of Arizona Press
*Pleasants, Adelene (1931). "History of Orange County, California. Vol. 1", Los Angeles, CA : J. R. Finnell & Sons Publishing Company
* California History, Bancroft - http://www.1st-hand-history.org/Hhb/HHBindex.htm
* "Two Years before the Mast" 1840 - Richard Henry Dana Jr.