Murrieta Tutors

About Murrieta

In Murrieta, California you will find the Santa Rose Plateau Ecological Reserve, which on the outside doesn’t sound very interesting. However, this reserve is actually home to a couple of historical adobes, which served as homes to the original owners of the lands.

If you’ve been meeting with your Murrieta history tutor, then you know that many areas in California originated from ranchos that once made up much of the state. In 1845 Juan Moreno was granted 48,000 acres for raising cattle in the California region, given to him by Pio Pico, the last Mexican governor that would have control over the region of California. Juan moved 100 head of cattle to the ranch, and quickly built a four-room adobe home. While most of the home was washed away in a heavy storm in 1884, one room still stands to this day.

In 1855 after California had officially become part of the United States, the US Attorney General questioned Moreno’s rights to the land. Unfortunately, Moreno was unable to gather the funds to fight the challenge in court, and so decided to sell his ranch Augustin Machado. The Machado family built another adobe house, more than likely in that same year, which is hypothesized to have been used for ranch hands, as the ranch still worked with cattle.

In 1876 the ranch was sold again, this time to two British partners, for one dollar an acre. Eventually one of the partners, John Dear, bought out the other partner, even though his son Parker Dear had already been living there for two years. Parker had a large 14 room house used for himself and his family, the adobes were used as homes for the ranch hands. Tragically, the large house was lost in a man-made fire in 1974, with nothing remaining of the great home.

In 1904 the ranch found itself in the hands of Walter Vail, a man who already had one successful ranch in Arizona. For 60 years one of the adobes was used as a bunkhouse, while the other served as a make shift jail for cowboys that had a little too much to drink.

In 1964 Kaiser Steel bought the property to be used as graze land for cattle. The Machado adobe was still used as a bunkhouse, while the Moreno Adobe was used as a tack room. Finally, 3,100 acres was bought by the Nature Conservancy, including the section with the two adobes, which also happen to be the two oldest structures in Riverside County. So after you’ve finished your lesson with your Murrieta tutor, you can always enjoy the trails, views, and history that the conservancy has to offer.