Vacaville: Named by a Rancho Land Deal

Vacaville sits in the broad valley between the Coast Ranges and the Sacramento plain, and its name traces back to a Mexican land grant and an unusual real estate condition. In eighteen forty-three, Juan Manuel Vaca and Juan Felipe Peña received a grant of more than forty-four thousand acres here from the Mexican government, land they called Rancho Los Putos. Around eighteen fifty, Vaca sold a portion to an American developer named William McDaniel for three thousand dollars, with one explicit condition: that McDaniel lay out a town on one square mile of the land and call it Vacaville.

McDaniel complied, and the town was founded the following year. Family tradition links the Vaca name to a legend from medieval Spain, in which an ancestor marked a strategic spot with a cow skull during the Moorish wars and earned the name Cabeza de Vaca. Vacaville incorporated in eighteen ninety-two and grew steadily as a center of orchard agriculture, particularly fruit drying, before suburban growth from the Bay Area corridor reshaped it in the late twentieth century.