A Brief History of Eastvale

By Loren P. Meissner and Kim Jarrell Johnson

The vibrant and beloved community of Eastvale was once an agrarian paradise. Developed initially as ranchlands, this area tucked along the Santa Ana River was transformed by industrious farmers who produced alfalfa and other crops, raised poultry and eventually thrived as dairymen. Eastvale's latest agents of change, however, weren't cattlemen or farmers but real estate agents. Indeed, land developers saw the same potential in Eastvale as the initial ranchers did. Beginning in the 1990s, developers created charming homes and planned neighborhoods for former city dwellers eager to live in Riverside County. Despite the changes, the bucolic ambiance of the bygone era remains. Authors Loren P. Meissner and Kim Jarrell Johnson recount the dynamic changes, important people and exciting events that created Eastvale.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Jul 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781614239635

Loren P. Meissner

Kim Jarrell Johnson is the author of several local history books including Wicked Jurupa Valley (2012). She is a board member of the Riverside Historical Society and history columnist for the Riverside Press-Enterprise and Riverside County Record. Loren P. Meissner is the author of several computer science books based on research at the former "Rad Lab, "? which became the Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory operated by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy. He taught computer science at San Francisco State University from 1981 to 1995.

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Bash.

INTRODUCTION

The Santa Ana River arises at springs near the nine-thousand-foot level, on the north slope of San Gorgonio Mountain about twenty-five miles east of San Bernardino in Southern California. The river flows across the Inland Empire and through Santa Ana Canyon before its one-hundred-mile journey to the Pacific Ocean ends southeast of Los Angeles. About halfway along its route, the river passes Eastvale and defines the city’s southern boundary.

Incorporated on 1 October 2010, Eastvale is still a new city, full of new houses, occupied by new residents. The population count grew from about 1,600 at the 1990 census to 6,000 in 2000 and more than 50,000 in 2010. Most of the 48,400 (or more) residents who arrived at Eastvale during the past twenty years have little inkling of the city’s previous history. They may have learned from early residents that there were more dairy cows than people at Eastvale in 1990.

A WIDE VIEW

Imagine that you are sitting in a darkened theater, waiting to learn about the history of Eastvale. The curtain is still closed, but some barely audible activity is going on backstage—perhaps alluding to events as long ago as the conquest of the Aztec empire by Cortés in 1521. Although the details are not yet clear, you feel that the backstage stir has some significance that will soon be revealed.

The curtain rises, and the scene comes into focus at a location near present-day Eastvale, between 1821 and 1848. Alta California is a province of Mexico, newly independent from Spain. In the background, herds of cattle roam the mesa, along its shallow valleys and over its low hills, on ranchos that have been granted to prominent Mexican citizens.

Your peripheral vision is not limited by the narrow theater stage. The geographical sphere you are watching is Cinerama-wide, and you become aware of influences on Eastvale history from far beyond present-day city boundaries. For example, you learn that territory administered by Mission San Gabriel Arcángel (founded in 1771) was gradually extended eastward beyond San Bernardino, encompassing present-day Eastvale. And you hear about Arcadia Bandini, who lived for perhaps a year (1840) during her early teens at the large adobe residence on Rancho El Rincón near Eastvale and later (1880) became famous for her philanthropy at Santa Monica.

GEOGRAPHICAL SPHERE OF EASTVALE HISTORY

Still, the most important events of Eastvale’s history, as viewed on a present-day screen, occurred within Southern California’s Inland Empire—the populated and industrialized portion of the Upper Santa Ana River Basin north and east of Prado Dam. Historical documents frequently describe this Upper Basin as the mesa or the tableland since it is relatively flat, although punctuated with shallow gullies and clusters of low hills.

Snowmelt flows into this basin from three mountain ranges along the San Andreas Fault line, each of which has peaks higher than ten thousand feet above sea level. From southeast to northwest, these are the San Jacinto, San Bernardino and San Gabriel ranges. Mitchell describes the topography of the Upper Basin and the mountains that bound it:

The San Jacinto Mountains rise to 10,834 feet at San Jacinto Peak, and constitute the final eastern wall, preventing the coast and its cooling influences from reaching the desert. These mountains drain westward into the San Jacinto River, which feeds Lake Elsinore, which then drains into Temescal Wash, which joins the Santa Ana River in the Prado Basin.

The San Bernardino Mountains, including 11,502-foot San Gorgonio Mountain, are the highest mountains in Southern California. The Santa Ana River proper begins just north of San Gorgonio Mountain. Fed by snowmelt and springs, the river here is more like a stream, 10 feet wide and fast moving.

The San Gabriel Mountains rise to the west of, but in line with, the San Bernardino Mountains. Separated by the San Andreas Fault at the Cajon Pass, these mountains provide the snowy backdrop most Southern Californians enjoy on clear winter days [as shown in the cover photo]. Mt. Baldy, officially Mount San Antonio, sits atop the crest of this range at an elevation of 10,080 feet above sea level.

The San Gabriel range drains southward. The Santa Ana River’s two most westerly tributaries, San Antonio Creek and Cucamonga Creek, flow into Chino Creek, a stub that runs eastward from the Chino Hills and meets the river just above Prado Dam, a few miles west of Eastvale. Due principally to diversion of water for irrigation since 1900, San Antonio and Cucamonga Creeks are now seasonally dry in their lower reaches but can overflow during heavy rainfall. Cucamonga Creek is channeled through a corner of present-day Eastvale west of Archibald Avenue, entering the city near Limonite Avenue and exiting across Hellman Avenue just north of Chandler Street.

Mitchell’s description continues:

The Chino Creek basin is a low-lying valley surrounded by mountains and hills, which form a bottleneck where the Santa Ana River squeezes between the Chino Hills and Santa Ana Mountains. Prado Dam was constructed at this bottleneck in 1941 to protect downstream areas from flooding. The wetlands and riparian forests behind the dam are today some of the most important habitats in Southern California, with more than 4000 acres of willow-cottonwood forest and other riparian and wetland communities.

To a child growing up in Eastvale before the western horizon became cluttered with silhouettes of houses, the Chino Hills were where the sun went each evening. Their maximum elevation is less than two thousand feet.

The Santa Ana Mountains form the southern boundary of the Upper Santa Ana River Basin. Their highest summit, 5,700-foot Santiago Peak, is clearly visible south of Eastvale, behind Corona. This range, which continues southeastward past Temescal Canyon and Lake Elsinore, provides some shelter from coastal weather effects but obviously has less influence than the ranges of much higher mountains to the north and east.

TIME BOUNDARIES FOR EASTVALE HISTORY

Historical time boundaries are similarly broad. Anthropologists estimate that ancestors of California’s aborigines crossed Bering Strait on a land bridge more than twenty thousand years ago and that primitive cultures in present-day Southern California had stabilized long before the era of recorded history began in China, Egypt or Babylon.

But prehistoric events within Eastvale’s present-day 13.1-square-mile boundaries seem not to have attracted much notice. Explorers during the 1500s discovered harbors at San Diego, Monterey and San Francisco, but they did not penetrate the inland valleys. De Anza’s overland treks from Sonora in 1774 and 1776 crossed the Santa Ana River near present-day Riverside and skirted Eastvale on the north.

Then, in 1838, Don Juan Bandini received a grant of land along the north side of the Santa Ana River that included all but a few acres of present-day Eastvale. Among surviving records from that year is the earliest known formal documentation of an event at Eastvale—the official survey of Bandini’s Jurupa grant boundaries. This survey is the event that begins our story.

Once upon a time…

Chapter 1

LAND GRANTS: JURUPA 1838, EL RINCÓN 1839

Juan Bandini was the first individual of European descent to own land in present-day Eastvale—or in any part of what is now northwestern Riverside County. The Mexican governor of California authorized a pair of land grants to Bandini in this area: Jurupa grant in 1838 and El Rincón grant in 1839. Together, these stretched along the north side of the Santa Ana River for almost twenty miles, encompassing most of the land in the present-day cities of Eastvale and Jurupa Valley. These grants continued from Prado, just west of Corona, northeastward all the way to Colton.

Two individuals besides Juan Bandini played major roles in the history of Eastvale during the land grant era. Abel Stearns, a Massachusetts Yankee, strongly influenced the history of Southern California ranching and merchandising. He acquired Mexican citizenship in 1828 at age thirty, married Bandini’s daughter Arcadia in 1841 and became owner of 85 percent of Jurupa land grant in 1859. Chapter 2 describes Don Abel’s further role in early stages of the transition from cattle ranching to American-style diversified farming.

Leonardo Cota married Ynez Yorba and became patriarch of a family that, for more than sixty years, maintained the large adobe house constructed for Juan Bandini on El Rincón, in the southwest corner of present-day Riverside County, a little more than a mile west of the boundary of present-day Eastvale. This Bandini-Cota Adobe, at the brow of a mesa, was finally merged into Prado Flood Control Basin, and the structure disintegrated after maintenance was discontinued, but satellite maps still reveal an outline of the ruins.

1.1 DON JUAN LORENZO BRUNO BANDINI

First Individual Eastvale Landowner

An unusual incident took place on the bluff north of the Santa Ana River about 175 years ago, on 4 December 1838.

Don Juan Bandini became the first individual landowner in present-day Eastvale on 28 September 1838 when Juan Alvarado, governor of the Mexican province of Alta California, awarded him Jurupa land grant. The grant stretched along the north side of the Santa Ana River for about seventeen miles, between present-day Eastvale and Colton, and averaged about four miles in width. A survey was undertaken about two months later, in early December, to confirm the boundaries of Jurupa grant.

While three distinguished-looking caballeros (horsemen) watched, two vaqueros (cowboys) rode along the riverbank to conduct the survey. The two gentlemen witnessing the survey with Bandini were Luis Arenas, mayor of Los Angeles, and Don Carlos Dominguez, who represented the Yorba family, grantee of adjacent lands. Garner explains: The measuring of the land was done on horseback. One rider would take one end of a lariat one hundred varas in length (slightly less than one hundred yards), and another rider would take the other end. The first man drove a number of long stakes tipped with iron into the ground every hundred varas. The second man pulled the stakes, by counting which they could tell how many varas had been measured off.

Boundaries

Riverside County historian W.D. Puntney quotes the 1838 survey record. Bandini’s Jurupa grant began at a prominent hill that eventually came to be included within the city of Riverside and "ran for thirty thousand varas along the Santa Ana River to ‘the point of the same tableland where Mr. Bandini had established the house and where the river makes a turn.’ The property line then ran north, ‘crossing between two springs of Guapan (probably Guapas)’ for another seven thousand varas where ‘the first sand hill’ marked the northwest corner."

The springs of Guapa (spelled variously) near the southwest corner of Jurupa grant have long since ceased to flow, presumably because irrigation has lowered the water table. (See Appendix A.) They are shown as ciénegas (springs) on an 1888 irrigation map, near the northeast corner of present-day Hellman and Chandler Streets. The springs fed a basin called Mill Creek or Rincon Creek, which still collects seasonal runoff from Cucamonga Creek east of Hellman Avenue.

A dam, mill and mill ditch (hence the name Mill Creek) are shown on the 1888 map about a mile downstream from the ciénegas. An 1890 Rincon Tract description notes: In one place a spring supplies some 250 inches of water, which is used to run the Chino valley grist-mill, being afterward turned to purposes of irrigation. This stream remains the same summer and winter, ‘the lay of the land’ being such that the rains affect it very little, while the summer droughts do not diminish the water supply. The mill was the Old Grist Mill, near Hellman and Chandler Streets, also shown on a map in Corona Library historical archives, annotated after 1971 by Christina Fear Desborough, who lived for a time in the nearby Cota family residence at El Rincón.

In 1974, anthropologists identified an old Gabrieleño village site called Guapa near this part of Cucamonga Creek, according to accounts by Gunther and by Langenwalter. Sites of other landmarks along the west and north sides of Jurupa grant can be approximated from surveys, which in 1879 confirmed the title to about forty-one thousand acres (sixty-four square miles) of land.