Last weekend we visited the Los Encinos Historic Park with Claire’s husband Robert. This park is all that remains of the grand Rancho Encino, owned starting in 1889 by Domingo Amestoy (picture), father of John B. Amestoy, the first owner of our new house.

We found out a couple of interesting facts. John was apparently also referred to as Jean, and the B stands for Baptiste.

We found nice pictures of John/Jean and his wife Francoise, which are not available in the digital archives, but which we will try to get our hands on copies of to hang in our house.

We learned that John was deeply involved in the business of the ranch before moving to LA and entering the grocery business. He identified the opportunity presented by new cheap rail service from LA to Chicago and took advantage of it by planting barley on the rancho and shipping it to Chicago. Sort of like figuring out that YouTube can serve up your videos cheaply.

See also original article about Bob and Sakiko’s new house .

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2007 at 22:21 and is filed under history and culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.