Rancho San Luis Gonzaga
Rancho San Luis Gonzaga was a 48,821-acre (197.57 km2) Mexican land grant in the Diablo Range, in present-day Santa Clara County and Merced County, California given in 1843 by Governor Manuel Micheltorena to Juan Perez Pacheco and José Maria Mejía. The grant was bounded by Francisco Pacheco's Rancho Ausaymas y San Felipe on the west (at the top of present-day Pacheco Pass), the San Joaquin River and San Joaquin Valley on the east, and Los Baños Creek on the south.
A grant was first made in 1841 to Francisco Jose Rivera of Monterey, but he returned to Mexico soon after and did not occupy the grant. The eleven square league grant was made to Juan Perez Pacheco and José Maria Mejía in 1843. Three days later, Captain Mejia gave his half of the grant to Pacheco. Juan Perez Pacheco (1823–1855) was the son of Francisco Perez Pacheco (1790–1860), grantee of Rancho Ausaymas y San Felipe. The rancho lay at a great crossroad where the road from Pacheco Pass into the San Joaquin Valley crossed the El Camino Viejo that lay along the west side of the valley. Its lands included the land and adobe ranch house of the old Spanish Rancho de Centinela (Sentinel Ranch) first established by pioneering stockmen from San Juan Bautista and Monterey as place to raise horses in 1810 and subsequently abandoned in the 1820s.
With the cession of California to the United States following the Mexican-American War, the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo provided that the land grants would be honored. As required by the Land Act of 1851, a claim for Rancho San Luis Gonzaga was filed with the Public Land Commission in 1852, and the grant was patented to Juan Perez Pacheco in 1871.
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