Tejon Ranch and the Two Hundred and Seventy Thousand Acres

South of Bakersfield, running from the floor of the San Joaquin Valley up into the Tehachapi Mountains and down into Los Angeles County, lies Tejon Ranch, a single property of approximately two hundred and seventy thousand acres. It is the largest single piece of private land in California, and it has been continuously managed as a unified property, under various ownership configurations, since the eighteen sixties.

The ranch was assembled in the eighteen sixties from several Mexican land grants, including the Rancho El Tejon and adjacent grants that had been issued before American acquisition and then confirmed, in whole or in part, by the federal land claims process. A consortium of investors that included Edward Fitzgerald Beale, a former naval officer and Indian agent who played a complex role in California's transition from Mexican to American governance, acquired the core of the property. Beale consolidated the grants, added acreage from various government transactions, and established the cattle operation that would define the ranch's economic model for the following century.

The ranch passed through several corporate ownership periods in the twentieth century, and it is now held by a publicly traded entity, Tejon Ranch Company, that manages it for a combination of agricultural, energy, and real estate purposes. The agricultural component includes cattle grazing, almonds, wine grapes, and pistachios. The energy component includes oil production and, more recently, wind and solar operations on the ranch's ridge properties. The real estate ambitions are larger: the company has for years proposed developing a portion of the ranch into a planned community called Centennial, which would be built on previously agricultural land at the edge of the Los Angeles metro area.

Los Angeles County approved Centennial in twenty nineteen after years of environmental review and water negotiations. Whether it is ever built is still an open question. The two hundred and seventy thousand acres in the meantime remain, as they have been for more than a century and a half, largely intact.