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Robert Glass Cleland

The Irvine Ranch

Third Edition
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$11.95, £7.95 paperback

9780873280150

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180 pages, 6 x 9 inches, 17 b/w illustrations
January 2003, Available worldwide
The Irvine Ranch in Orange County is one of the largest properties remaining from California's Rancho Era. In 1952 the Huntington Library first published the history of this gigantic ranch—from the days of the Gabrielino Indians, through the rule by Spain and Mexico, to the ownership and administration by four generations of the Irvine family. The ranch was a combination of three large land grants that went, wholly or in part, into the making of the Irvine property.

Dr. Cleland tells the history of these grants and provides reproductions of old maps and portraits of early owners. Using ranch records and many other sources, Cleland combines sound historical scholarship with a high degree of literary skill to tell the story of the ranch in the larger setting of the history of the region and the state. An Epilogue by Robert V. Hine describes the changes that have taken place since the book was first published, and tells of the long-range plans for light industry, residential and commercial use of the land, and for a University of California campus.
"This is almost as much a history of the whole region (and, in the social sense, of the state itself), as it is of the Irvine Ranch . . . an example of local history at its best—the story of a limited area, fully told, yet relating to and helping to interpret the larger scene, physical and historical, of which it is a part."—San Francisco Chronicle

"Cleland . . . has traced with considerable affection and obvious skill the development of this extensive estate . . . and has recounted a goodly amount of the social and economic history of southern California."—Pacific Historical Review
Robert Glass Cleland (1885–1957) was the author or editor of numerous books dealing with the history of California and Mexico.
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