Rancho Los Palos Verdes has been the scene of some of the earliest as well as the latest development in Los Angeles County. For more than thirty years before Willmore platted Willmore City, later called Long Beach, and before Jones and Baker laid out their harbor city of Santa Monica there had been a thriving settlement at the port of San Pedro in the Rancho Los Palos Verdes.

The town of San Pedro, later city of San Pedro, and now part of the city of Los Angeles, was built around that port settlement and almost the entire district was carved not out of the Rancho San Pedro, as is generally understood, but out of the Rancho Los Palos Verdes.

The rancho was granted June 3rd, 1846, by Governor Pio Pico to Jose Loreto Sepulveda and Juan Sepulveda, brothers, this grant being a ratification of a previous one made in 1827. It extended from Redondo to Wilmington and bounded on the north and northeast by Rancho San Pedro and on the southeast, south and west by the Pacific Ocean, comprising 31,629 acres. Pico, however, reserved a plat of land along the beach, 500 varas square, for the use of the “Superior Government of the Mexican Nation.”

With the death of the original grantees and the passing of the ranch title to their many heirs, Rancho Los Palos Verdes passed into a period of extensive litigation and had it not been of such tremendous size and of such constantly increasing value in all probability it would soon have belonged to the attorneys. From 1865 to 1880, seventy-eight lawsuits were instituted involving the rancho. The ranch title itself was not confirmed until 1880. All of the heirs and their successors in interest held undivided parts of the rancho and six partition suits were filed before the property was divided according to the respective ownerships. There were also a dozen suits to eject squatters, several divorces among the owners, three condemnation suits by the United States government for land for the lighthouse at Point Firmin, an action to fix the boundaries of Timms Landing at the port, two foreclosure actions and several complaints for possession.

The commissioners in one of the partition suits platted the town of San Pedro, composed of ninety-eight blocks and this plat filled the two-fold purpose of making an easy method of dividing the property among the partitioners and of providing for the growth of the settlement at the harbor.

In the years that followed the east part of the rancho progressed rapidly while thousands of acres in the hills from Point Firmin to Redondo were retained in a few ownerships and the land used only for farming. Few people ever saw the rugged coast of Palos Verdes, although Malaga Cove, Rocky Point, Point Vicente, Long Point, Portuguese Point and Portuguese Bend were all known to fishermen.

In 1913 for a consideration of nearly $2,000,000 the western part of the rancho was conveyed to Jay Lawler and Frank A. Vanderlip, then of New York. Palos Verdes Estates was conceived in 1922 to develop this part of the property and to make a world-famous community of homes. The rancho of the Sepulvedas is a perfect setting for this effort.