Yucaipa: Wetlands of the Serrano

The name Yucaipa comes from a Serrano word, Yukaipat, meaning wet or marshy land. The Serrano and Cahuilla peoples had lived in this valley for centuries before the mission era, drawn by the reliable water that feeds the bowl between the mountains.

In eighteen forty-two, Don Diego Sepulveda built an adobe here, making it one of the earliest rancho settlements in the San Bernardino highlands. After California statehood, Mormon settlers from Utah bought the surrounding Lugo Rancho and subdivided it. Then in nineteen ten, the Redlands and Yucaipa Land Company purchased eleven thousand acres and platted a town of small farms, five to twenty acres each, designed to let families grow citrus and grapes on the terraced hillsides. That agricultural grid still shapes Yucaipa's landscape today.