The Wolfskill Grant: First Vineyards of the Valley

The land you are passing through was once part of the Wolfskill Grant, a Mexican land concession of more than seventeen thousand acres awarded in eighteen forty-two to Kentucky-born mountain man William Wolfskill. Governor Juan Bautista de Alvarado granted him four square leagues along both banks of Putah Creek, a tract that reached into what are now Solano and Yolo Counties. Wolfskill had come west on the Old Spanish Trail a decade earlier and settled in Los Angeles before acquiring this northern valley property.

A county history identifies him as the first settler to plant fruit trees and vineyards in this part of California, in eighteen forty-two. When his brother John arrived in mid-summer of that year to work the land, they called it Rancho de los Putos. Wolfskill descendants later donated part of the land to the University of California, Davis, which still operates it today as an experimental orchard.