Rancho Sespe
Rancho Sespe was a 8,881-acre (35.94 km2) Mexican land grant in present-day Ventura County, California given in 1833 by Governor José Figueroa to Carlos Antonio Carrillo. The grant encompassed the Santa Clara River Valley between Piru Creek on the east and Santa Paula Creek on the west, and was bounded to the north and south by the mountains, and included present day Fillmore.
Carlos Antonio Carrillo (1783 – 1852), the son of José Raimundo Carrillo of the prominent Santa Barbara family, had been elected to the assembly and was later Governor of Alta California from 1837-1838. Carrillo claimed the Sespe grant was for six square leagues (approximately 26,000 acres (105 km2)). Carrillo took possession of the grant in 1842 and as required, built an adobe house; although the Carrillo family remained in Santa Barbara. Carrillo died in 1852 and his wife Josefa died in 1853. Thomas Wallace More and his brothers, Andrew and Henry, purchased the entire rancho in 1854 from the estate of Josefa Carrillo.
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 Sespe was filed by Carrillo with the Public Land Commission in 1852, and six square leagues confirmed in 1856. But the U.S. government appealed the confirmation based on evidence that the Expediente had been altered from two square leagues to read six square leagues. Complicating the dispute, More’s attorney, Hinchman, agreed to the government’s much smaller description of Rancho Sespe without the More’s approval.
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