CELEBRATE! : ORANGE COUNTY’S FIRST 100 YEARS : CREATING A COUNTY : The Yorba Legacy

It all began in 1810 when Jose Antonio Yorba settled on 62,516 acres along the Santa Ana River--a grant known as Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana. Although the land had all but passed out of family ownership by the late 1800s, one of Yorba’s sons, Bernardo, established his own rancho, Canon de Santa Ana, in what now is Yorba Linda. From his line come the Yorba landowners of today. Bernardo reputedly was a shrewd businessman referred to by contemporaries as the ‘Spanish Yankee.’ He drilled into his heirs’ the importance of clinging to the land, and his lesson apparently took.

David Belardes lives with his wife, two sons and mother-in-law in a buff-colored tract house in San Juan Capistrano, just west of Trabuco Creek. From their family room, the Belardeses have a view of both the old and new church spires at Mission San Juan Capistrano, where many of their ancestors are buried.

The Belardeses’ home is on a street named Via Belardes in the bottomlands of what once was the Belardes ranch.

The only land that David and Gloria Belardes own is the small plot on which their house sits. They are not wealthy. She works at the mission, and he is a groundskeeper for the city school district.

It was their great-great-great-grandfather who was one of the biggest landowners in what now is Orange County.

BELARDESES ARE descendants--through lines in each of their families--of Jose Antonio Yorba, the Spanish soldier who came to California with the Gaspar de Portola expedition in 1769 and who, in 1810, was granted title to 62,516 acres along the Santa Ana River--a grant known as Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana.

Although the original Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana acreage had all but passed out of family ownership by the late 1800s, one of Yorba’s sons, Bernardo, established his own rancho, Canon de Santa Ana, on the north side of the Santa Ana River in what now is Yorba Linda. From his line come the Yorba landowners of today.

Bernardo, the most prosperous of his father’s sons, reputedly was a shrewd businessman and was referred to by contemporaries as the “Spanish Yankee.” He drilled into his heirs the importance of clinging to the land, and that lesson apparently took.

Bernardo M. Yorba, great-grandson of his namesake and a member of the board of trustees of Orange County Centennial Inc., today lives on Yorba land in Santa Ana Canyon that he inherited. And, like his ancestors, he makes his living from the land--but as a developer rather than a rancher.

Another Yorba descendant whose family still holds land that can be traced to the 1834 Mexican grant that established Rancho Canon de Santa Ana is Gilbert Kraemer.

His grandfather, Samuel Kraemer, married Angelina Yorba--granddaughter of Bernardo--in 1886. The union combined her land with Kraemer’s adjacent ranch in the hills above Yorba Linda to form a 1,600-acre parcel.

The Kraemer heirs also received acreage in Placentia, the remnants of a farm settled by great-grandfather Daniel Kraemer when he came to Orange County from Illinois in 1865.

Samuel Kraemer and his seven brothers and sisters left their Placentia land to their descendants in individual parcels, Gil Kraemer recalls, while the combined Kraemer-Yorba land in Yorba Linda was handed down intact, each descendant receiving an interest in the undivided property.

The land--in both places--was farmed for years, Kraemer says, “until we saw the advent of urbanization” of the Placentia-Yorba Linda area in the early 1960s. Then family members met and resolved to combine their holdings once again and operate the property under a family-run board of directors.

Initially, two separate companies with overlapping boards were formed. In 1979, however, the two companies were merged, and Founders K Corp.-- now FKC Partners--began overseeing development of the properties. About 700 acres remain, the rest having been sold for residential development.

Gilbert Kraemer cannot talk long about his family without a love for the land showing through. He is proudest, he says, of the fact that after so many generations, the family still is bound together by its land. “So many times, it is all gone by the third or fourth generation . . . We have a lot of pride in what we’ve done . . .”

Despite the family’s huge landholdings in the 1800s, few of the current generation in Orange County are major landowners. Those who are trace their ancestry through Yorba’s third-eldest surviving son, Bernardo.

And as the Yorba lineage enters its eighth generation, the Yorba name is a minority one in a family in which surnames like Belardes, Dominguez, Kraemer, Simmons, Avila, Muckenthaler, Serrano, Raitt, Sepulveda, Richards, Rimpau, Burruel, Travis, Carrillo, Callahan, Peralta, Rowland and Sanchez predominate.

JOSE ANTONIO FRANCISCO YORBA, patriarch of the family, was born in July, 1746, near Barcelona. There appears to be nothing recorded about Yorba’s childhood, but it is known that he enlisted in the Spanish army as a member of the Royal Catalan Volunteers sometime in his late teens. In 1767, the Catalans--from the provinces of Catalonia--were ordered to duty in New Spain, later to be called Mexico.

Yorba was stationed in Sonora the next year when his lieutenant received orders to select men for a mission, under Capt. Gaspar de Portola, to explore Alta California. Yorba was one of 61 soldiers and sailors who, accompanied by a chaplain, set sail for Upper California on Jan. 9, 1769. Yorba survived the scurvy that struck down most of the ship’s complement during the 110-day voyage from La Paz, and when his ship, the San Carlos, anchored in San Diego Bay on April 29, 1769, he and the few other healthy soldiers on board joined their comrades from the expedition’s second ship, the San Antonio.

After weeks of outfitting and training, the Portola expedition left San Diego on July 14. On July 23, the Portola party arrived at a hill about two miles above what later became the site for Mission San Juan Capistrano. The next two days, July 24 and 25, the party camped on the Trabuco Mesa--so named because it was there that one of the soldiers lost his blunderbuss, trabuco in Spanish. The explorers slept near what now is El Toro on the 26th, and on the 27th, they clambered down from the hills into the mouth of a large valley, where they camped near a small, clear creek the soldiers called Santiago in honor of St. James, the patron saint of Spain.

The next day, July 28, 1769, the party trudged across a flat plain, through waist-high wild mustard. The men topped a small rise about midday and looked out over a placid, 100-yard-wide river.

Yorba thus became one of the first Europeans to gaze upon the Santa Ana River--although the name first bestowed on it was Dulcisimo Nombre de Jesus de los Temblores , the river of the Sweetest Name of Jesus of the Earthquakes.

Father Juan Crespi, expedition chaplain, wrote in his diary that he chose that name because the soldiers were shaken by “a horrifying earthquake, which was repeated four times during the day.”

But for all of Crespi’s eloquence, the soldiers called the river Santa Ana, and that is the name that stuck.

No one knows what the 23-year-old Yorba thought of the river, the surrounding land--which Crespi described as “good land which can be easily irrigated”--or the earthquakes.

But his impression must have been favorable, because about 30 years later, retired from the army as a sergeant because of a disability and accompanied by his second wife and several children, Yorba took up residence on land near the Santa Ana River where his father-in-law, former army lieutenant Juan Pablo Grijalva, had settled.

WHEN JOSE ANTONIO YORBA CAME to the Santa Ana Valley, he apparently left behind in San Francisco two grown sons by his first wife, Indian convert Maria Gracia Feliz, whom he married in 1773 while stationed in Monterey and who died in 1781 after bearing him three sons.

One of those sons died in early childhood, and history appears to have lost track of the other two, who were not mentioned in Yorba’s will. Arnold O. Dominguez, a local historian and Yorba descendant, says that both are believed to have died--childless--before the death of Jose Antonio.

In November, 1782, Yorba, then 36, married 15-year-old Maria Josefa Grijalva. By the time her father retired in 1796 and took up residence along the Santa Ana River, she had given Yorba two sons: Jose Antonio II, born in 1785, and Tomas Antonio, born in 1787. In all, they had 13 children together.

When Grijalva filed a petition for a grant to the land in 1801, his papers said that he already had been grazing cattle and sheep there for some time and that Yorba also had a house on the rancho. The grant was never awarded, but the boundaries spelled out in the petition approximated those requested successfully nine years later by Yorba and Juan Pedro Peralta--Grijalva’s grandson.

Yorba and Peralta jointly applied in November, 1809, for grazing rights on what they called Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana--the petition written on their behalf by 22-year-old Tomas Yorba.

On July 1, 1810, the two received the formal grant. Today, the cities of Orange, Santa Ana, Costa Mesa, Tustin and Villa Park are all or partly located on land carved out of the rancho.

WHEN YORBA DIED ON JAN. 16, 1825, he left a will that has served through the years as an account of his success. In the will the 78-year-old patriarch listed among his possessions his adobe house at Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana, a 30-acre vineyard there (walled to keep the cattle out), an orchard, 800 head of cattle, 32 oxen, 250 sheep, 19 pack mules and their saddles and a second house near the presidio at San Diego.

By early California standards, Yorba was rich. And some of his heirs were destined to become even wealthier.

But what gave the illiterate, retired army sergeant the wherewithal to make Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana a prosperous rural kingdom was the fruit of an earlier, illicit venture--selling sea otter furs to Yankee traders in violation of a ban on commerce with anyone but authorized Spanish traders.

The Americans, however, paid a lot more for the pelts than did the Spaniards, and the accounts of the Mercury, a ship out of Boston, show that on Sept. 24, 1806, Yorba sold $1,268 worth of otter pelts, receiving $631.50 cash and the rest in trade goods. And on July 29, 1807, according to historian Wayne Dell Gibson, Yorba again sold a load of pelts to the Mercury’s captain, this time for $1,070 in trade goods. In those days, $1,000 was a good 10 years’ wages for the average California ranch hand.

The cash and goods that Yorba received in those transactions, and in others that went unrecorded, doubtless helped set him up as a ranchero, Gibson suggests.

When Yorba died, his principal heirs--as was customary at the time--were his widow, Maria Josefa, and his four surviving sons: Jose Antonio II, Tomas, Bernardo, born in 1801, and Teodocio, born in 1805. His five surviving daughters--Isabel, Presentacion, Raymunda, Francisca and Andrea--were barely mentioned in the will.

But Maria Josefa broke with tradition and, in what appears to have been an early stand for women’s rights, forced a decision to give Jose Antonio’s heirs joint possession of the huge rancho.

They held only undivided interests in the rancho, however, and that hastened the undoing of the great estate as the family grew larger and more diverse. Because interest in the property was shared equally by all, the only way a descendant could cash in on his or her legacy was to sell to another family member or, as happened several times, sue for partition of the land.

Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana survived the Mexican War of Independence and the war between the United States and Mexico that ended in 1848 with the United States annexing what now are the states of California, Arizona, Texas, Nevada, Utah and New Mexico. It also survived the U.S. Lands Commission, formed in 1850 to rule on the validity of some 800 Spanish and Mexican land grants in California.

But it did not survive the financial needs of the ever-growing Yorba clan, exacerbated by the drought of 1863-64, which saddled many Southern California rancheros with immense debt and decimated their cattle herds.

Already, some of the heirs had sold out for what now appear to have been meager sums. Isabel Yorba, for example, sold her interest in the rancho to her brother, Teodocio, for $200 in 1853. Domingo Yorba--Jose Antonio’s grandson and David Belardes’ great-grandfather--sold his share to Jose Sepulveda in 1854 for $6,000, 150 head of cattle and 50 horses.

Finally, in 1866, Abel Stearns, the nearly bankrupt owner of neighboring Rancho Los Alamitos and a claimant to some of the Yorba lands, brought suit on behalf of himself and a large number of Yorba and Peralta descendants to partition and dissolve Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana.

And on Feb. 24, 1868, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Pablo de la Guerra ruled in Stearns’ favor and named a three-member commission to divide the 62,516-acre rancho among the more than 100 claimants.

That task, according to historian Robert Glass Cleland, took six months. And a lot of the land went, in lieu of cash fees, to the attorneys who represented the various Yorba and Peralta relatives in the lengthy proceedings. The city of Orange, for instance, was founded on Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana land that attorneys A.B. Chapman and Andrew Glassell obtained as their fee.

Within a few more years, almost all of the rancho was in the hands of Yankee land developers.

WHILE JOSE ANTONIO YORBA’S eldest sons, Jose Antonio II and Tomas Yorba, were working the original rancho (Tomas even established the area’s first general store at the original ranch headquarters in Olive), Bernardo and Teodocio Yorba struck out on their own.

Bernardo obtained the 13,378-acre Rancho Canon de Santa Ana grant in 1834 and later secured a second grant, also of about 13,000 acres, for Rancho la Sierra in what now is Riverside County. He also purchased a smaller rancho, El Rincon, in San Bernardino County. All three had contiguous boundaries near the site of the Prado Dam, and one historian wrote that Yorba could ride all day long in almost any direction and not leave his land.

Don Bernardo, as he came to be called, was the most prosperous of the second generation of Yorbas, and an 1836 census shows that his Canon de Santa Ana had 46 residents, 11,000 head of cattle, 1,500 horses and 800 sheep. The late Terry Stephenson, a historian and early county official, wrote that Yorba in the late 1830s installed what is believed to be California’s first gravity-fed irrigation system--a series of trenches cut through to the Santa Ana River.

Don Bernardo built a huge adobe, San Antonio, with wood floors, extensive tile work and 30 rooms, and in it installed each of his three successive wives. It was home to his 20 children.

WHILE THERE IS A WEALTH OF documentation on the property and genealogy of the Yorbas, little has been written or handed down that shows what the early rancheros were like as human beings.

But Tomas Yorba’s 54 existing letters, compiled by Gibson in his 1976 book about the second of Jose Antonio’s sons by Maria Josefa, show that he was a loving father, a businessman occasionally plagued by money worries, a lover of chocolate and, in the mid-1830s, a man fearful of attacks by the Indians and Sonoran bandits who roamed the ranchos, stealing livestock.

Arnold Dominguez recalls one story his grandmother, Felipe Yorba Dominguez, told about Don Bernardo--her grandfather.

“Don Bernardo was married three times,” Dominguez says, “and this was when he was married to his third wife. She apparently didn’t like the relatives from the earlier wives, and my grandmother told me a story once of how she was visiting Don Bernardo when his wife said something to hurt her feelings. She started crying, and Don Bernardo picked her up and hugged her. She said she remembers that he was warm and had a rosary around his neck. He asked her what was wrong and she said that grandma didn’t love her. And she said that Don Bernardo looked at her and said, ‘Well, that’s all right, I love you.’ ”

Bernardo Yorba died in 1858 at the age of 57. His body was carried by relays of vaqueros and Indian workers to Calvary Cemetery in Los Angeles, where it was interred until 1923. Then it was removed to the Yorba family cemetery in Yorba Linda, which had not been completed when the don died.

Bernardo’s younger brother, Teodocio, lived on the Santiago de Santa Ana until 1846, when he received a grant from California’s last Mexican governor, Pio Pico, a gambling and horse-racing crony. The grant was for “four leagues, more or less” just to the west of the upper portion of Santiago de Santa Ana.

That grant, the Rancho Lomas de Santiago, later became the top half of the giant Irvine Ranch.

Teodocio ran up a lot of debt and, according to papers that his great-great-granddaughter, Mildred Yorba MacArthur Serrano, left to the Sherman Research Library in Corona del Mar, mortgaged his land in 1859 to settler and trapper William Wolfskill for $7,000. A year later, he deeded over the land to avoid paying the debt.

Yorba apparently still occupied the land, however, and, according to the Serrano papers, in 1861 petitioned the U.S. government for legal title. That petition resulted in a survey that inexplicably showed Lomas de Santiago to be 11 square leagues, or about 47,000 acres--despite the Pico grant’s definition of its size as 13,000 acres. Teodocio Yorba died in 1863, without receiving the title he’d claimed. In 1866, Wolfskill sold the land--all 47,000 acres--for $7,000, about 15 cents an acre, to Benjamin and Thomas Flint and Llewelyn Bixby--partners of a rancher named James Irvine. Two years later, Irvine’s name showed up on a deed as half owner, and in 1876, he bought out his partners and became sole owner of what came to be called the Irvine Ranch--made up of the Lomas de Santiago and parts of two other ranchos.

In 1964, the Irvine Co.’s ownership of the property was attacked by Teodocio Yorba’s descendants, who claimed that because the 1859 mortgage to Wolfskill described the property as “four leagues, more or less,” all Wolfskill--and later the Irvine Ranch--had claim to was 13,000 acres. Teodocio Yorba’s heirs, the suit claimed, were entitled to the remaining 34,000 acres. The case was dismissed in Superior Court in Los Angeles, and the heirs lost subsequent appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court.

FOR HISTORIANS, THE YORBA story ended with the dissolution of Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana in 1868. The family from that point on simply was too large and diverse to track with any consistency. But Yorbas did continue to be actively involved in the life of the county--Don Bernardo’s heirs on their Santa Ana Canyon citrus and avocado ranches, others as ranch hands, storekeepers, farmers, mechanics, lawyers, teachers and land developers.

So diverse, in fact, is the family that several descendants interviewed for this account said they had heard there was a Yorba branch in San Juan Capistrano, but professed ignorance of anyone connected with it.

The Yorbas, says Arnold Dominguez, are not given to family reunions, and the various branches rarely socialize.

David Belardes, one of the San Juan Capistrano Yorbas, isn’t surprised that distant relatives in Tustin and Anaheim and Placentia don’t know much about his branch of the family.

Belardes is an avid amateur historian who keeps a family tree tracing his and his wife’s lineage back to Jose Antonio I on a family-room table that’s piled high with a growing collection of Yorba family documents and portraits stretching back to the mid-1800s. He ruefully admits that he has little firsthand knowledge of his Yorba ancestry because, in his family and others, “all of the older people seem to be going to their graves with all this history still in their heads instead of written down.”