Downtown San Jacinto is seen in a vintage post card. The history of the name “San Jacinto” involves the California missions and a Polish priest. (Courtesy of Steve Lech)

In the waning days of Spanish rule in California, the mission influence continued to grow.  Their burgeoning populations needed more space for their herds of animals.

One such mission was that of San Luis Rey, in present-day Oceanside.

In the late 1810s, officials at San Luis Rey opted to enhance their territory by claiming a vast area of more than 130,000 acres in present-day Riverside County. It was bounded by today’s Woodcrest to the west, the Badlands to the north, the foothills of the mountains to the east, and their own holdings at Temecula to the south.

To formally claim the territory, they established an outpost on the feast day of St. Hyacinth, a 13th-Century Polish priest who worked to reform women’s monasteries in his native country.

Hyacinth is known as Jacinto in Spanish, hence the name San Jacinto. St. Hyacinth’s feast day is Aug. 17, and R. Bruce Harley, former archivist and historian for the Diocese of San Bernardino, puts the year that the outpost was established as 1819.

The small outpost that was established by the mission officials was on top of what became known as Casa Loma hill, a small fault-caused uplift in the middle of the San Jacinto Valley, just north of the present-day intersection of the Ramona Expressway and Warren Road.

The outpost compound consisted of a small rooming house for the mayordomo (the official in charge of the herds of animals), several granaries to hold barley and wheat, and — of course — a small chapel. These buildings combined took on the familiar L shape of many mission building compounds and had the advantage of being on the slight elevation of the hill so that most of the mission grounds could be seen.

There seems to have been an abundance of water there also.

Father Jose Sanchez of San Luis Rey wrote in 1821, “From this little elevation where the enramada is situated, north to south, there are springs. In front of the enramada, toward the northeast, is a spring of tepid water.”

Sanchez also indicated that the original name for the location was “Jaguara, so called by the natives, but by our people San Jacinto.”

In 1842, during Mexican rule in California, Jose Antonio Estudillo was granted the old mission outpost as part of his Rancho San Jacinto Viejo, although he noted that the compound was basically in ruins. Estudillo rebuilt the compound, and is probably the one who gave it the familiar name of “Casa Loma.”

Around 1873, Francisco Pico, a nephew of California’s last Mexican governor Pio Pico, purchased the lands surrounding the Casa Loma and the Casa Loma itself. Pico took the compound, which had been improved by the Estudillo family, and enclosed it in a larger, L-shaped house for his family.

The Casa Loma remained in the Pico family until 1961, when Pico’s niece Ruth Pico, sold the Casa Loma and about 3,800 acres surrounding it to a developer, who subdivided the acreage into large dairy parcels, many of which are still used today for dairy operations.

Unfortunately, the Casa Loma, or “House on the Hill” as it was later called, was destroyed by a fire in 1969, thus removing one of the last vestiges of the Spanish past in Riverside County.

However, the name San Jacinto still survives, 200 years later.


Join the Conversation



blog comments powered by Disqus