Valencia, California: Tataviam Village to the Newhall Ranch

The Santa Clarita Valley held a Tataviam village called Chaguayanga for well over a thousand years, part of a trading corridor between the Chumash coast and the Mojave Desert. Spanish missionaries from San Fernando swept through in the seventeen nineties and the Tataviam population collapsed within a generation from disease and mission labor.

In eighteen thirty-nine, Mexico awarded this land as Rancho San Francisco, nearly forty-nine thousand acres of open range. Henry Mayo Newhall, a San Francisco auctioneer turned land baron, bought the core of it in eighteen seventy-five. The Newhall family ranched and farmed it for nearly a century, planting Valencia oranges so extensively that when the family's land company finally decided to build a master-planned suburb in the nineteen sixties, they named the new community after the crop.

The first Valencia homes opened in nineteen sixty-seven, designed with an internal network of paseos, pedestrian paths that still set it apart visually from most California suburbs. The Newhall Ranch name lives on in the controversial development to the west that broke ground in twenty seventeen.