Giving an O.C. Pioneer His Due, Finally

The story in the morning newspaper had Eddie Grijalva steaming.

Archeologists working near Orange in May had uncovered the floor of a nearly 200-year-old building they said was from the county’s earliest rancho, home of the Jose Antonio Yorba family.

But Grijalva, a retired school custodian from Orange, knew better. He no sooner finished reading the article than he gathered up his collection of old maps and documents and drove over to confront those at the dig.

The adobe--he informed them--was one of three in the area built not by Yorba, but by Orange County’s true first ranchero.

“You didn’t even mention Juan Pablo Grijalva,” he told them.

Few do.

Which is what fuels Eddie Grijalva’s missionary zeal to see that a distant relative--one that until six years ago he never knew existed--is publicly recognized for his role in Orange County history, a position of prominence that time and circumstance have denied him.

Juan Pablo Grijalva was a Spanish soldier from Sonora, Mexico, who arrived in California in 1776 with the expedition led by Juan Batista de Anza.

In 1801, he petitioned the Spanish government for use of the land that became Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana, Orange County’s first rancho. The 63,000-acre rancho is now the site of El Modena, Olive, Orange, Santa Ana, Tustin, Villa Park, Costa Mesa and parts of Anaheim Hills and Newport Beach.

Grijalva built three adobes from which he and his vaqueros oversaw the sprawling domain. His hilltop home is believed to be the first private adobe dwelling in the county outside Mission San Juan Capistrano.

There’s no question Juan Pablo Grijalva was a significant figure in early Orange County history. Yet his is hardly a household name. Not like Yorba.

Jose Antonio Yorba, who married one of Grijalva’s two daughters, re-petitioned for use of the land after his father-in-law died in 1806. The rancho prospered under the Yorbas. Their name lives on--most notably in the city of Yorba Linda, but also in the naming of a cemetery, schools, streets and a shopping center. Even Juan Pablo Peralta, who was Yorba’s partner, is better known than his namesake grandfather.

Juan Pablo Grijalva has been relegated to mere footnote status in many history books--if he’s mentioned at all.

“Many history books still say that Yorba started the rancho,” said historian Doug Westfall, publisher of Orange City Magazine. “Some state Yorba started it with Grijalva or that Yorba started it with Peralta.

*

“The truth is Juan Pablo Grijalva alone founded the rancho, but he fell into history and we lost him: When he died, his name died with him. He had no direct male descendant to carry on the name, much less inherit the land.”

Eddie Grijalva, 63, a sixth-generation cousin, is setting the record straight.

Westfall said it was Grijalva’s search for his roots “that uncovered a previously unknown hero of California.”

Juan Pablo Grijalva not only founded Orange County’s first rancho, Westfall said, but as a soldier he helped found presidios, pueblos and missions both in Baja and Alta California.

Eddie Grijalva has been spreading the word of his distant relative’s role in California and Orange County history to local schools and historical societies. He has told the story to history classes at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Southwestern University in San Diego, and at a state conference in Sacramento.

The Orange County Pioneer Council is conducting a series of oral history interviews with Grijalva about his research.

And Grijalva was honored last year by the Mexican American Arts Council and the Society of Hispanic Historical and Ancestral Research at Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana. There were proclamations from the cities of Orange and Santa Ana, which declared Eddie Grijalva Day.

But Grijalva is not seeking attention for himself.

“His whole point,” said Westfall, “is to get notoriety for a guy that died 190 years ago.”

And, late this summer, Juan Pablo Grijalva will finally receive the formal recognition that has eluded him for nearly two centuries: The Orange County Historical Commission will unveil a cast bronze plaque at the foot of Hoyt Hill in east Orange marking the site of Grijalva’s long-gone original adobe.

“Nobody else had researched Juan Pablo Grijalva like Eddie has,” said Don Dobmeier of the historical commission. “It’s become his quest, and he’s turned up material, which nobody realized was still in existence.”

*

For Eddie Grijalva, who retired in February as custodian at Spurgeon Intermediate School in Santa Ana, formal recognition of his all-but-forgotten relative will come none too soon.

“Here’s a man that should have been recognized but wasn’t,” he said. “I thought, ‘If I don’t say something, another hundred years will go by and who will care?’ ”

Bernardo Yorba, great-great-grandson of Jose Antonio Yorba, agrees that Juan Pablo Grijalva hasn’t received enough recognition for his role in Orange County history.

Yorba, who lives in Anaheim Hills, said he always thought that Juan Pablo Grijalva petitioned for the land but died before it was granted.

“We think we know so much about the history, but there’s so much to learn,” he says. “I think Eddie Grijalva is to be commended for making this effort.”

*

Eddie Grijalva, who grew up in El Toro, lives in a mobile home park in Orange less than five miles from where the Grijalva adobe once stood.

Over the years, his father, Louis, a worker in an Orange rope-making company, had talked about a famous Spanish soldado named Grijalva who had come to California with the Anza expedition.

Then, in 1990, Grijalva read a history book about the Anza expedition which mentioned that Sgt. Juan Pablo Grijalva had joined the expedition in Sonora.

“I had to find out what that name had to do with our name,” Grijalva said.

His great-grandfather, Luis Grijalva, had come to California from Sonora in 1850. He married a Gabrielino Indian from the area near the Riverside County line that is now the site of Prado Dam.

Grijalva’s quest for family information took him to the Mexican state of Sonora, border towns in Mexico and Arizona and to university and mission archives throughout Arizona and California.

Traveling alone on vacations and holidays, the divorced father of two grown children virtually retraced his ancestor’s footsteps.

“I was just obsessed with it,” he said.

He discovered that he comes from a family of explorers dating back to 1518, when Juan de Grijalva explored the Yucatan Peninsula. There were two other explorers named Grijalva during the same period. Another ancestor, Merejildo Grijalva, was a U.S. Army scout in Arizona in the 1860s and ‘70s.

“All along, it seems, a Grijalva has been moving and looking and exploring,” he said.

By 1993, Grijalva felt he had enough information to approach the Orange County Historical Commission about having the Grijalva adobe acknowledged as a historical site. “They knew about the site, but nobody had ever done anything about it,” he said.

He was told he would have to provide proof that Juan Pablo Grijalva had actually lived in the adobe.

“I was pretty brokenhearted,” said Grijalva. “I said, ‘This is a mountain to climb. Where am I going to find these things?’ ”

But he talked to his friends, Westfall and Paul Apodaca, curator of Native American art at Bowers Museum:

“They told me, ‘Eddie, it’s there. You’ve got to find it.’ ”

He returned--a more experienced researcher this time--to the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. After two days, he found a U.S. land office document from the mid-1800s that said that Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana was originally petitioned for and occupied Dec. 8, 1801, by Juan Pablo Grijalva.

He had found what he needed.

But, there was more.

*

Juan Pablo Grijalva’s original rancho diseno, the hand-drawn map that accompanied his petition for the rancho--the same linen map Yorba and Peralta used to repetition for the land in 1810--was also in the archives. So was a diary by Father Mariner that mentions an expedition led by Grijalva to explore San Diego County for the site of what would become Mission San Luis Rey.

And, also waiting to be explored were Juan Pablo’s handwritten military journals that chronicle his duties as a soldier. One of the few Spanish soldiers who could read and write, he traveled from Loreto in Baja California to the mission in San Francisco to inventory each mission’s livestock, grain and population.

Juan Pablo Grijalva spent 10 years stationed in the presidio in San Francisco and another decade at the presidio in San Diego before retiring in 1795. As was the custom, a retired Spanish soldier could be rewarded with a land concession.

“At the time, when you petitioned for land they gave you the right to build your home, use the land and live on it, but at any time the Spanish government could reclaim it,” Grijalva said.

In 1797, Juan Pablo Grijalva petitioned for Rancho Las Flores, a 130,000-acre tract in north San Diego County that became Rancho Santa Margarita and is now Camp Pendleton.

The retired soldier started to build an adobe and had brought in livestock when Mission San Luis Rey asked for the land back, saying it was needed for agriculture.

That’s when Juan Pablo Grijalva came to what would become Orange County.

*

Eddie Grijalva made his first visit to the site of Juan Pablo Grijalva’s casa in 1992.

The old adobe, which had crumbled more than a century ago, stood on Hoyt Hill, so named after William Hoyt, a citrus grower from Massachusetts who built a large, two-story Victorian house on the site in 1887.

Since the early 1960s, it has been the home of Frank and Jo Ann DeVore.

Grijalva learned that a three-car garage now stands on the adobe site and rocks used for a retaining wall and a border along the driveway came from the old foundation.

On his first visit to the site, Grijalva took a few pictures, but mostly he walked around the tranquil, tree-shaded grounds.

“I could just close my eyes and try to picture what happened here nearly 200 years ago,” Grijalva said. “Just the idea of standing there where your ancestor may have stood was just mind-boggling. It’s a real wonderful feeling, like you’ve been looking for a long-lost somebody and finally you find him.”

Frank DeVore has told Grijalva he’s welcome any time.

“He gets kind of close to his ancestors and he really believes and feels that. I admire and respect that,” said DeVore, who donated the $800 for the marker that is now being cast.

Grijalva’s attempt a couple of years ago to have a new high school in Santa Ana named for his relative failed, Juan Pablo Grijalva proving to be no match for the late farm worker leader Cesar Chavez.

He is currently working on a petition to present to the city of Orange to have a section of North Hewes Street below Hoyt Hill renamed Avenida de Grijalva.

He appreciates the recognition that is coming at last to Juan Pablo Grijalva.

He can’t help wondering though: What if there had been a son to carry on the family name and inherit the rancho?

“Just think about it,” he said. “I’m sure we would have had a town named Grijalva, streets, schools. . . . but there’s not even an alley.”