MISSION VIEJO : Birth of a City : City-in-Waiting Owes Name to a Phantom Mission

Nobody just sat down and decided to name Orange County’s newest city Mission Viejo.

It evolved from the phrase Mision Vieja, Spanish for Old Mission. Spanish explorers tried to set one up in the area, but the exact site is still a mystery.

However, its supposed location still is marked on U.S. Forest Service maps by a small dot with a circle around it and the notation “old mission site.”

The dot is four miles east of San Juan Capistrano along San Juan Creek on the north side of Ortega Highway, and it’s on Rancho Mission Viejo property several miles south of the new city.

“There’s really nothing there now,” said Bob Clark, vice president of agriculture for the ranch. “We had some archeologists out here not long ago on another job, and just for our own curiosity we had them do some digging on the site. They didn’t find anything in the way of foundations or artifacts.”

If mission construction work had been started there 200 years ago, he said, any remains might have been washed away by storms that flooded San Juan Creek as late as 1969.

Father Junipero Serra

Historians say efforts to found that mission apparently were aborted by a combination of water shortages and an Indian uprising against the Spanish explorers headed by Capt. Gaspar de Portola.

At any rate, Mission San Juan Capistrano finally was established in 1778 and still exists in San Juan Capistrano, thus the abandoned one was called “the old mission.” The name Mission Viejo clung to a widespread area of the empty rolling hills and plains for many years until it was eventually applied to the 10,000 acres that compose the new city.

The first white men in what is now Orange County were Portola, 63 soldiers and Father Junipero Serra, a group whose job was to set up a string of missions as far up the coast as Monterey.

In July, 1769, their horses’ hooves stirred up the dust among the pungent sage and chaparral of the canyons and open spaces spread out in the clear air beneath the looming twin peaks of Saddleback Mountain.

They bivouacked one night and traveled the next day through what is now Mission Viejo, picking their own trails, killing rattlesnakes and encountering all manner of wild creatures.

Land Deals

In 1821, Mexico won its independence from Spain and a number of land grants were made to prominent citizens, among them an Englishman named John Foster, who married the sister of Mexican Gov. Pio Pico and changed his name to Don Juan Forster, according to historian-author Jim Sleeper.

Forster acquired title to three ranchos in what is now Orange County: Rancho Trabuco, 22,184 acres; Rancho Mission Viejo, 47,432 acres, and Rancho Los Porreros, 1,167 acres.

Pico himself took on 133,440 acres to the south (in San Diego County) and called it Rancho Santa Margarita. Through a series of circumstances, Forster eventually got those lands too, but in the 1880s was forced to sell all his holdings.

They were picked up by an Irishman named Richard O’Neill and partners including a James C. Flood. In 1907, O’Neill deeded his interests to his son, Jerome, while the Flood heirs took over the vast lands of Rancho Santa Margarita in San Diego County. Jerome later turned his holdings over to his sister, Mary, and younger brother, Richard O’Neill Jr.

The O’Neills were lucky, because at the beginning of World War II, the U.S. Navy and the Marine Corps took over the entire San Diego County portion of Rancho Santa Margarita and developed it into Camp Pendleton.

But Richard Jr. died soon thereafter, leaving his interests to his widow, Marguerite (for whom Mission Viejo’s main street, Marguerite Parkway, is named), and his children, Alice and Richard Jerome O’Neill.

According to accounts given by Richard Jerome, who still owns the 42,000-acre Rancho Mission Viejo, sticky relationships arose between family members and the trustee, but by 1963, the Mission Viejo Co. was formed, 10,000 acres of the ranch were sold and development of what will become the county’s 27th city began.

Some of the things that would have staggered the Spanish explorers on horseback, plodding through the seemingly endless backcountry, had already begun to happen.

The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway tracks skirted the western edge of Mission Viejo and reached San Juan Capistrano by 1888, a boon for cattlemen and farmers.

Access from the north began to open up in 1929, when Pacific Coast Highway was paved all the way to Dana Point. Five years later, the southern part of Orange County was connected with Riverside County when Ortega Highway (named for one of Portola’s scouts) was opened between San Juan Capistrano and Lake Elsinore. One of the most scenic drives in the state, it recently has become one of the most dangerous because of its narrow, twisting roadway and the increase in traffic.

In 1958, a true sign of modern times appeared with the completion of Interstate 5, which, besides going smack along the western portion of Mission Viejo, connects Los Angeles with San Diego, carrying thousands of trucks and cars daily.

Homes and businesses began popping up willy-nilly in the once-virgin wilderness sections of the south county. When the Mission Viejo Co. was formed in 1963, one of its principal goals was to create an orderly community, deliberately planned as a place where one could be proud to live, “The California Promise” as developer brochures declared.

Homes Open in 1966

Extensive landscaping was promised and delivered; by 1966 the first families began to move into new homes, and not long after that the Marguerite Recreation Center, with its Olympic-class pool and diving boards, was opened. It would produce some of the best swimmers and divers in the country, with the Mission Viejo Nadadores capturing the women’s and overall titles at the national AAU competition in 1975.

Adding more water to the once arid inland, a 125-acre manmade lake was completed and opened in 1978 and waterfront homes and private docks began to appear. A “market on the lake” complex of shops, restaurants and other businesses followed, all with their own docks for the use of small boats which, incidentally, had to be powered either by sail or electricity so the lake wouldn’t be fouled.

Before that, in 1968, Saddleback Community College opened with 1,300 students who heard Gov. Ronald Reagan give the dedication speech. The college now has more than 19,000 students.

The following year, what was then called Mission Viejo Community Hospital opened with 126 beds. It now is called Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center and, according to spokeswoman Jan Walker, has 212 beds and “is still growing.” The hospital is about to launch the fourth phase of a $60-million expansion that began last year.

Ford at Anniversary

The community celebrated its 10th anniversary in 1976, and none other than President Gerald R. Ford added to the doings by dedicating a flag at Mission Viejo High School.

More national and international attention came to the city-to-be in 1984 during the Summer Games of the XXIII Olympiad when long-distance bicycling road racers whizzed around a course that circled the lake. That same year, Nadadores swimmers won 13 medals, including 10 golds, at water events in Los Angeles.

There is just no way that a handful of Spanish soldiers, making their dusty way two centuries ago through canyons and fields where no white man had been before, could have dreamed up any of these things. But at least they may have helped in getting the name started--Mission Viejo.