How the Verdugo Family Lost the Crescenta Valley

　The name Verdugo is attached to so many things in our valley – roads, parks, businesses, even the mountains we look at every day are named for this Spanish family. The name Verdugo is part of our collective DNA. The Verdugo family once owned our entire valley, along with Glendale and parts of Burbank and L.A. So what happened? Here’s the story.

The land was given to Jose Verdugo in 1784 by the King of Spain as a reward for his service in the Spanish Army. (He was a corporal of the guard at Mission San Gabriel.) Jose Verdugo ran cattle and grew crops on his land, mostly down by the Los Angeles River, the southwestern border of his land. He ignored the Crescenta-Cañada valley as the water sources were fewer here. Jose died in 1831, and his rancho was split between his kids, Julio and Catalina.

Just before that, in 1821, Mexico won independence from Spain, so the Verdugos’ rancho was now under Mexican control. In 1843 Ignacio Coronel, a young teacher from Mexico, took a look around the Crescenta-Cañada Valley and noticed that no one seemed to be using it. Simply put, he went to the Mexican government, and said, “The Verdugos never use that land. Can I have it?” The Verdugo family protested, but the Mexican government agreed with Coronel – the Verdugos weren’t using it. Might as well let Coronel give it a shot. So Coronel was now a land owner, owning the Crescenta-Cañada Valley, along with Verdugo Canyon (now Verdugo Woodlands). He moved to a spot by the Verdugo Creek, about where Verdugo Park is today.

But it was a tough go for young Coronel. Here are his own words about his time there: “We lived in a house constructed of tules (cat tails). We had a corral made of poles stuck in the ground close together where we enclosed a band of 80 mares, also six cows and 12 yokes of oxen. In 1844 there was a larger house built near the cienega (marsh). It was built of wood and was six varas (yards) square, roofed with tules. We planted a small crop of beans, corn, etc. In 1844 we were obliged to leave the rancho on account of the attacks of the Indians at which time one man was killed and 20 head of horses were stolen… In the year 1847 we left the rancho … because the war was upon us (Mexican-American War). The rancho was the principal place where all the wild Indians come down … for the purpose of committing depredations and robberies.”

In 1850, California became part of the U.S. Soon after, Coronel bailed out, trading the Crescenta Valley to a couple of American lawyers for $700 in legal services.

This was a tough period for the Spanish-Mexican property owners. By treaty, the U.S. was obligated to honor the land ownership at the end of the Mexican-American War, but we all know how good the U.S. was at honoring its treaties during this period. There ensued a collision of cultures, and the U.S. courts favored the opportunistic Yankees. Americans carved off and traded sections of the Verdugos’ land as the family racked up debts and legal fees.

Interestingly enough, in 1857 the Verdugo family regained the Crescenta-Cañada Valley briefly by trading some of their land farther south. But they soon borrowed against it and lost it again. In a final blow in 1870, a group of Americans got together and sued the Verdugos and other landowners, claiming the land ownership records of the Verdugos’ former rancho were a total mess. The resulting court decision, known as “The Great Partition,” divided the former rancho land among 28 people. The Crescenta-Cañada Valley went to two of the plaintiffs, Glassell and Chapman. They in turn flipped the property to Lanterman and Williams. The Verdugo family got only small fractions of their former vast rancho. The family members drifted away after having sold or lost the land to pay legal fees or taxes. In CV, the last remnant of the huge rancho is merely the family’s name – Verdugo.

  mike lawler