Jose Antonio Yorba
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
José Antonio Yorba (1746-1825), known also as Don José Antonio Yorba I, was one of the important early settlers of Spanish California (then known as Alta California). Born in San Sadurni de Noya in the Spanish province of Catalonia, Yorba first came to the New World as an officer in the Portola Expedition of 1769. For his service, Yorba was awarded with an enormous land grant from the Spanish crown in 1809 that comprised a significant portion of today's Orange County in Southern California. Covering some 62,512 acres, Yorba's great rancho included the lands where the cities of Olive, Orange, Villa Park, Santa Ana, Tustin and Costa Mesa stand today.
Among José Antonio's many children, Don Bernardo Yorba I (1801-1858) would rise the farthest, accumulating ever larger territories for the family's massive cattle herds. Don Bernardo may have also have introduced irrigation agriculture into California near his seat, the Rancho San Antonio, which was amongst the largest of early California--though reports have probably exaggerated the number of its rooms as being in the hundreds. After American rule was established in California in 1848, the Yorba lands were amongst the very few to be preserved intact, and it has been sometimes supposed for this reason that the Yorba family was particularly close to the American cause. Throughout this period and afterwards, descendents of the Yorbas would marry into other prominent Spanish families, including the famous Grijalva, Perralta, and Dominquez. Later Yorbas would mix with prominent American families in the Orange County area, including the Kraemers and Irvines. In the early twentieth century, Samuel Kraemer, who had married the last of the "grand" Yorbas, Angelina Yorba, tore down the delapidated Rancho San Antonio after the city of Yorba Linda refused to accept it as a donation. Today, the legacy of the Yorba Family can still be appreciated at the historic Yorba Cemetery, established in 1858 at Woodgate Park.
See also Californios.
