It’s uncertain that William Welles Hollister might envision the mark he would make on California whereas he was driving his 6,000 head of sheep from Licking County, Ohio, to California.
Hollister’s 2,000-mile trek, on which he was accompanied by a brother, a sister, and 50 herdsmen, led to what’s now San Juan Bautista.

When he arrived, only one,000 of his unique 6,000 sheep have been alive. Nonetheless, he parlayed what was left of this Ohio wool “on the hoof” into one in all California’s nice non-public for-tunes.

He’s liable for colonizing the city of hollister free wave in San Benito County and Lompoc in Santa Barbara County.
“As a result of so many California cities are named for saints,” stated one of many city or-ganizers of Hollister in San Benito county, “let’s identify this one for a sinner.”

Hollister was an industrious particular person. His fortune swelled throughout the subsequent 14 years. He bought his San Justo Rancho in San Benito County to maneuver again to the Santa Barbara nation he admired a lot whereas driving his band of scraggly sheep up the coast.

Colonel Hollister, in partnership with the Dibblee Brothers, Thomas and Albert, seized each alternative to buy land grants. They purchased the Refugio Rancho in Santa Barbara County, together with a number of different land grants, together with the Lompoco, Las Cruces, Salsipuedes, San Julian, and Mission Viejo.

Hollister’s important want was to amass the Tecolotito Canyon space on the Dos Pueblos grant, which he had coveted 17 years earlier than on his sheep drive.

The property was in the marketplace, nevertheless it had a cloudy title. The minor heirs of the unique grant holder have been nonetheless alive and there was a query of whether or not the property could possibly be bought. This did not deter Hollister from plunging forward with the deal. The legal-ity of the acquisition was nonetheless in litigation when he died.

Cash was of little consequence to the now-wealthy Hollister. He constructed greater than six miles of fencing, nearly unparalleled in Santa Barbara County. He established a dairy herd and imported a panorama gardener to plant velvety lawns and unique flora across the property.

He widened the county street, now Hollister Avenue, linking Santa Barbara and Go-leta, and bordered it with an avenue of palms and pines.

All the time adventurous, Hollister imported 25 bushels of Japanese tea crops, which he thought would develop within the soil and local weather of his Dos Pueblos Rancho.

He employed two Japanese tea planters to plant his 50,000 seedlings. A frost killed all the tea challenge in a single day.
The Refugio Rancho might be the primary working cattle ranch aside from mission op-eration in Santa Barbara County.

Hollister and the Dibblee brothers bought the prop-erty from the heirs of Capt. Jose Francisco de Ortega, who acquired the grant in 1834.

James J. Hollister, Sr., a son of Col. Hollister, supervised Rancho Refugio, operating it in a method not in contrast to the “Outdated West.” He was identified for using the “bloody disguise” technique of drawing stray critters from the chaparral-choked canyons on the ranch.

It was a technique supposedly invented by the Ortegas and concerned the location of a disguise from a freshly butchered bull over a bush. The odor of the contemporary disguise drew bellow-ing cattle like a magnet from the brushy hillsides with out the necessity of vaqueros.

Gov. Juan B. Alvarado granted 13 main ranches in Santa Barbara County between 1836 and 1842. The primary grant bearing Alvarado’s signature was La Punta de la Concep-tion, a 24,992-acre tract. It was later divided into two better-known ranches, La Espada and El Cojo.

These names, which means “the sword” and “the lame man” have been dubbed on the proper-ties by troopers of the Portola Land Expedition that handed up the coast in 1769 in quest of the ensenada of Monterey.

Within the 1860s, Chinese language staff have been delivered to Santa Barbara County from Canton by Colonel W. W. Hollister to work on his Goleta Valley property and to function bus boys, cooks, and waiters in his lodge.

Between 1869 and 1877, W.W. Hollister planted 25,000 almond bushes, 1,500 English walnuts, 1,500 orange bushes, 1,000 lemons, 500 limes, and 750 olives.

Col. Hollister’s land grants included Lompoc. Right here, huge herds of his sheep grazed earlier than he bought a part of his holdings to the Lompoc Valley Land Firm in 1874. The lands consisted of the Lompoc Rancho and the Mission Vieja de la Purisima Rancho. The city was laid out 9 miles from the coast, close to the middle of the Lompoc Valley. The tons bought nicely and the city flourished.

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