How Does Rancho Santa Margarita Sound? Tug-of-War Over Historic Name Ends

The War of the Names is over: there will be only one Santa Margarita in the State of California, and it will not be in Orange County.

That is the gist of a letter sent by the Santa Margarita Co., developers of a planned 20,000-home project near Mission Viejo, to San Luis Obispo County Supervisor Carl Hysen, in whose district lies the tiny town with the much sought-after name.

“We have every right to use the name Santa Margarita,” said Santa Margarita Co. President Anthony Moiso in the letter that Hysen received Monday morning. “However, we do recognize the worry you have voiced on behalf of the residents. I have modified our postal application to request a Rancho Santa Margarita mailing address.”

The decision to change the development’s name puts to rest a dispute that has been brewing since June, when the townspeople of Santa Margarita first got wind by way of news reports of the company’s plan to appropriate “their” name for the 5,000-acre Orange County project.

“We’ve been here for 125 years,” Hysen said, “and the name is much older than that.” Residents of Santa Margarita--”the sign outside says Pop. 700,” Postmaster Reba Lancaster said--claim that the town was named by Father Junipero Serra on a northward trek about 1767.

But before Father Serra made it up north, said Tom Blum, Santa Margarita Co. executive vice president, the missionary christened a Santa Margarita in Southern California. In 1882, the O’Neill family--of which Moiso is a fourth-generation descendant--took possession of the Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores. Now they are turning a portion of it into an unincorporated planned community and want to preserve some of the history of the place, Blum said.

But the Santa Margarita residents to the north would have none of it. “It’s a matter of people saying: ‘Hey, that’s our name, and there’s no reason for you to use it,’ ” Lancaster said. “There’re plenty of other names around.”

The town’s Advisory Board, along with Hysen, barraged the U.S. Postal Service, the Orange County Planning Commission and something called the U.S. Board of Geographic Names, in Reston, Va., with letters, asking them to stop the name duplication. Not only did they want to protect their claim to a romantic name, but they were also worried that their mail would wind up in the wrong Santa Margarita, and vice versa.

The agencies wrote back saying that there was nothing they could do--the company needed no one’s permission to name its project Santa Margarita.

The Postal Service did say, however, that no two post offices in the same state may have the same name. The development company, located in San Juan Capistrano, had asked that the new Santa Margarita be given its own ZIP code, but the Postal Service had not yet ruled on the request when the company changed its request last week.

“There are 65 cities with the same names and different ZIP codes in California,” Blum said. “We honestly thought we could live very peacefully with the same name. But it became an emotional issue for the people up there--we certainly didn’t mean to initiate that.”

Moiso and Blum flew to San Luis Obispo and visited Santa Margarita on Aug. 8 and, after meeting with Hysen, returned to Orange County and decided to add a Rancho to their project’s name.

“We felt we have just as much stake in the heritage of the name,” Blum said by telephone Monday. “And names are very, very significant. But we saw the potential for a spiraling type of debate that serves no purpose.”

Blum and Moiso were particularly chagrined by an editorial in The County Telegram-Tribune, a San Luis Obispo newspaper, that portrayed them as villainous “big-time developers with Gucci shoes.”

“People were losing their objectivity,” Blum said.