Page 13 - Exploration10LLR

Disintegration

The rancheros became land rich and cash poor, and the burden of attempting to defend their claims was
often financially overwhelming. Grantees lost their lands as a result of mortgage default, payment of Notes:
attorney fees, or payment of other personal debts. Land was also lost as a result of fraud. A sharp decline in ________________________
cattle prices, the floods of 1861–1862, and droughts of 1863–1864, also forced many of the overextended ________________________
rancheros to sell their properties to Americans. They often quickly subdivided the land and sold it to new
settlers, who began farming individual plots. ________________________

A shift in the economic dominance of grain farming over cattle raising was marked by the passage of the
________________________
California "No-Fence Law" in 1874. This repealed the Trespass Act of 1850, which had required farmers to
protect their planted fields from free-ranging cattle. The repeal of the Trespass Act required that ranchers ________________________
fence stock in, rather than farmers fencing cattle out. The ranchers were faced with either the high expense
of fencing large grazing tracts or selling their cattle at ruinous prices. ________________________

________________________
Legacy
________________________
The ranchos established land-use patterns that are still recognizable in contemporary California. Many
communities still retain their Spanish rancho name. For example, Rancho Peñasquitos, the first land grant by ________________________
the Spanish in today's San Diego County, is now a suburb within the city of San Diego. Modern communities
often follow the original boundaries of the rancho, based on geographic features and abstract straight lines. ________________________
Today, most of the original rancho land grants have been dismantled and sold off to become suburbs and
rural-burbs. A very small number of ranchos are still owned by descendants of the original owners, retain ________________________
their original size, or remain undeveloped.
________________________
Rancho Guejito in San Diego County is considered the last of the San Diego Ranchos to be undeveloped.
Only a few historic structures and an 8,000ft² ranch house, built in the 1970s, occupy the 13,300 acres.
Benjamin Coates purchased the land in the 1970s after Governor Jerry Brown vetoed a purchase that would
have made Guejito a state park. Mr. Coates purchased an additional 8700 acres of surrounding land
between the 1970s and his death in 2004. Mr. Coates and his wife Nancy both expressed their wishes that
the Rancho remain undeveloped. After her death in 2006, ownership of the land passed to their daughter,
Theodate Coates, an artist from New York City. Despite her parents’ wishes that development be kept off of

the Rancho, Theodate Coates has taken steps to remove Rancho Guejito's status as an agricultural preserve
and eventually develop the land into tract housing.

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