Rancho Sespe

Rancho Sespe was a 8,881-acre (35.94 km2) Mexican land grant in present-day Ventura County, California given in 1833 by Governor José Figueroa to Carlos Antonio Carrillo.

[1] The grant encompassed the Santa Clara River Valley between Piru Creek on the east and Santa Paula Creek on the west, and was bounded to the north and south by the mountains, and included present day Fillmore.

Thomas Wallace More and his brothers, Andrew and Henry, purchased the entire rancho in 1854 from the estate of Josefa Carrillo.

[4][5][6] 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.

Complicating the dispute, More’s attorney, Hinchman, agreed to the government’s much smaller description of Rancho Sespe without the More’s approval.

More took control of Rancho Sespe and inherited the difficulties surrounding its legal boundaries.

[10][11] Settlers, or squatters as they were also called, began to arrive in the Santa Clara River Valley seeking public lands during the mid to late 1860s, following the American Civil War.

More filed an application in 1875 to buy the remaining four square leagues from the government under the "pre-emption" laws of 1866.

More, when they began to subdivide their property during the 1880s, the majority of residents who finally settled in the Rancho Sespe area, had homesteaded their land.