Jared Sidney Torrance

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Jared Sidney Torrance (1852-1921) was an American real estate developer, best known as the founder of Torrance, California in southwest Los Angeles County.

Torrance was born in New York and moved to southern California in approximately 1887, settling initially in Pasadena where he worked in real estate. Among other notable transactions, he briefly owned the Mount Lowe Railway at the turn of the century.

In the early 1900s Jared Torrance and other investors saw the value of creating a mixed industrial-residential community south of Los Angeles. They purchased part of an old Spanish land grant and hired landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. to design a new planned community. The resulting city was founded in 1911 and named after Torrance.

In 1920 Jared Torrance formed the Torrance Hospital Association, but he died before a hospital could be constructed in the new city. His widow Helena Childs Torrance followed through on Jared's vision and in 1925 the Jared Sidney Torrance Memorial Hospital (now named the Torrance Memorial Medical Center) was opened.

Torrance was also an amateur genealogist and did extensive research on his family roots. He wrote a book entitled The Descendants of Lewis Hart and Anne Elliott [1] which was published posthumously by his wife in 1923.