Rancho Laguna de los Palos Colorados

[2] In 1835, Joaquín Moraga (1792–1855) and his cousin, Juan Bernal (1802–1847), successfully petitioned and were granted their request for Rancho Laguna de Los Palos Colorados.

[3][4] With the cession of California to the United States following the Mexican-American War, the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo provided that the land grants would be honored.

By 1859, through a series of complex and often questionable transactions, most of the Rancho Laguna de los Palos Colorados had been acquired by lawyer Horace Carpentier.

[8][9] Irvine died in 1947 and in 1953 his heirs sold his remaining 5,000 acres (20 km2) of the original rancho to the Utah Construction Company.

During the thirteen years that Utah Construction owned the land, they never built a single home although this was the period of the great growth in the valley.