Lomita
, California
Real Estate and General Information
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About
Lomita
Bordered
by Torrance to the west and north, Harbor City to the east and the
Palos Verdes Peninsula to the South, Lomita is a relatively small
community with an abundance of housing options, most of which are
well priced when compared with it's immediate neighbors. Housing
options include original beach cottages, newer construction single
family homes, townhomes and condominiums.
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The
earliest known inhabitants of Southern California probably arrived
before 9000BC, based on radiocarbon dates of artifacts found on
the Channel Islands.
Evidence of
the earliest known indigenous inhabitants of Lomita and environs,
the Gabrielino Indians, has been found in a village they called
Suangna, or "Place of the Rushes", near what is now the
intersection of 230th Street and Utility Way in Carson. Remnants
of this village remained even as late as the 1850s.
Lomita's part
in the Spanish period of California's history begins in 1542, when
Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo sailed into Bahia de los Humos, or Bay of
Smoke as he called it, followed by Sebastian Viscaino in 1603, who
renamed it San Pedro Harbor, after Saint Peter.
Things remained
relatively quiet until 1784, when a Spanish soldier named Juan Jose
Dominguez, a member of the Portola Expedition, requested and received
permission to use 75,000 acres of land in Southern California from
Don Pedro Fages, the Spanish Governor of California. Rancho San
Pedro, the first land grant to be bestowed in California by King
Charles III of Spain, stretched from the Los Angeles river to the
Pacific Ocean and included what would become the cities of Carson,
Torrance, Redondo Beach, Lomita, Wilmington, and parts of San Pedro.
At about the
same time, the Sepulvedas established and started raising cattle
on Rancho Los Palos Verdes, which caused quite a stir with the Dominguez
family, as the Sepulvedas hadn't actually received a land grant.
They quarreled often, part of present day Lomita laying at the boundary
of their dispute, which they didn't resolve until 1841, when the
Sepulvedas finally acquired and signed a deed.
The rancheros
flourished until the 1860s, when a series of natural disasters hit
Southern California:
Too much rain
in 1861
Too little in 1862
A paralyzing small pox epidemic in 1862
The ravaging of grazing lands by swarms of grasshoppers in 1863
No rain in 1864
The utter destruction of the region's cattle herds by 1865
The rancheros foundered. Due to delinquent taxes and mortgage foreclosures,
Rancho Los Palos Verdes was divided up and sold to 17 different
buyers in 1882. Most of the land that consitutes present day Lomita
was sold to a farmer named Ben Weston and the Ranch Water Company,
which sheep farmer Nathaniel Andrew Narbonne, who was born in Salem,
Massachusetts, owned. Narbonne received 3,500 acres.
Narbonne had moved to Lomita from Sacramento's gold rush country
in 1852. He had initially worked with General Phineas Banning in
Wilmington and later, with partner Ben Weston, grew wheat and raised
sheep on Santa Catalina Island.
The above excerpt is from the City Hall Website for the City of Lomita:
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