Irvine: From Tongva Homeland to Master-Planned City

The ground beneath Irvine carries layers most residents never think about. For thousands of years the Tongva people, also called the Gabrielino, lived along these coastal foothills, speaking a Shoshonean language and trading across a network of villages from the mountains to the sea. Spanish soldiers arrived in seventeen sixty-nine with Gaspar de Portola, and by the early eighteen hundreds the land was folded into the vast mission grazing system.

Mexico issued Rancho San Joaquin as a land grant in eighteen thirty-seven, and when California became a state, Irish immigrant James Irvine gradually bought up those ranchos to assemble about one hundred ten thousand acres of sheep pasture and row crops. The Irvine Company ran that ranch operation for nearly a century. Then in nineteen sixty the family donated one thousand acres to anchor the new University of California campus, and architect William Pereira drew the spokes of a planned city radiating outward from it.

Irvine incorporated in nineteen seventy-one, a city whose street grid was drawn on a drafting table rather than worn in by foot traffic.