Jared Torrance was born in Gowanda, New York, in 1853, and moved to Southern California in approximately 1887 to settle initially in Pasadena where he worked in real estate.
Among other notable transactions, he briefly owned the Mount Lowe Railway, above Pasadena in the San Gabriel Mountains, at the turn of the century.
In the early 1900s Jared Torrance and other investors saw the value of creating a mixed industrial-residential community south of Los Angeles.
They purchased part of the Spanish land grant Rancho San Pedro and hired nationally renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. to design a new planned community, with the architect Irving Gill designing the principal buildings.
He wrote a book entitled The Descendants of Lewis Hart and Anne Elliott[6] which was published posthumously by his wife in 1923.