Rancho Temescal (Serrano)

The Rancho was settled in 1819 by Leandro Serrano, and became the first non-native settlement within the boundaries of what would become Riverside County, California.

The only supporting evidence of his claim was a paper from the San Luis Rey Mission permitting him to occupy the land for grazing.

[1][2][3] The grant claim extended along the Temescal Valley south of present-day Corona and encompassed El Cerrito and Lee Lake.

In the 1840s Leandro built his third and last adobe on the road between San Diego and Los Angeles, which later became part of the Southern Emigrant Trail during the California Gold Rush.

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.

[8] When the decision came that the Serrano family had no right to an acre of the land they called their own, a 160-acre homestead was secured surrounding their home.

Members of the family gradually left the valley until only the mother and two youngest daughters remained raising barley and cultivating their old orchard.

Voting irregularities there that year, resulted in a court case between the candidates for a California State Assembly seat.

The trial was so contentious it included the shooting of Bethel Coopwood, one of the opposing lawyers by the other in court, before the results could be determined.

Its school house was built under a huge sycamore tree and served until 1889, when a new building took its place in the early 1900s.

After the Supreme Court ruling, experts from England examined the tin district, and made favorable reports which encouraged the California Mining and Smelting Company to be incorporated in London, on July 24, 1890, also another corporation, the San Jacinto Estate, Limited, was formed, by prominent financiers of London, including some of the men interested in the Welsh tin mines.

In 1942 the Tinco Corporation, revived the mine in order to supply the demand for tin during World War II.

[17] In May 1886, the South Riverside Land and Water Company was incorporated, its members including ex-Governor of Iowa Samuel Merrill, R. B. Taylor, George L. Joy, A.S. Garretson, and Adolph Rimpau; as a citrus growers' organization, it purchased the lands of Rancho La Sierra of Bernardo Yorba, and the Rancho Temescal grant and the colony of South Riverside was laid out.

Farms and orchards in the central part of the Temescal Valley were abandoned, and the old adobes along the stage route crumbled and disappeared.

[18] In 1896, South Riverside was renamed Corona for a 3-mile circular drive that is around the central city and was the site of international automobile races from 1913 to 1916.