Like many San Diego County residents, our household subscribes to “Watch Duty.” This is a website maintained by volunteers to track wildfires and floods. As former evacuees of the 2007 Witch Creek blaze, we appreciate the alerts, although we regret seeing so many lately. However, these warnings have also served to inadvertently give your History Seeker team insights into the history of places—and place names, some even in our own neighborhood, that we’d never heard of before.

An alert not long ago about a fire near “Morettis Junction,” in the Santa Ysabel area offered a local history lesson. A little digging revealed that it stands near the junction of Highways 76 and 79, about a mile southeast of Lake Henshaw. It shows up on a number of realty sites but like many residential areas in our county it was once ranch land. Specifically, it was part of a much larger ranch purchased in the early 1900s by Felix Moretti, a Swiss immigrant. Born in 1889, Moretti came to California in 1907 with his wife Ernesta. By the early 1920s, joined by other Moretti family members, they had established a dairy farm in the Santa Ysabel area.

The immigrants did well. According to a short article in the Escondido Weekly Times-Advocate on April 10, 1925, “The Moretti Ranch consists of 17,000 acres and is now sustaining a big herd of milk cows, of which 400 are now being milked, with a daily shipment of 1,070 gallons of milk to San Diego.”

Felix Moretti died in 1954 at the age of 64, but the Moretti name lives on in a cattle ranch still run by his descendants in the Santa Ysabel area, as well as the residential neighborhood nearby.

Sources for this post included Leland Fetzer’s book San Diego County Place Names A to Z , the archives of San Diego County newspapers, and carrisitoranch.org, website of the Carrisito Ranch.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, millions of unemployed young men got jobs through the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). They also improved the nation’s environment and infrastructure by restoring forests, building dams and other projects we still benefit from to this day.

Join your History Seeker for my class, “The CCC: Creating Jobs, Saving the Land,” on Wednesday, August 5th at 10 a.m. at the Oasis Rancho Bernardo Lifelong Learning Center. Click on the link below to sign up.

https://san-diego.oasiseverywhere.org/product/the-civilian-conservation-corps-creating-jobs-saving-the-land

A newspaper editor I once worked with told me there was a story behind every place-name in San Diego County. And my research has borne that out.

Ever wonder who the Felicita was behind Felicita Park? Or the Warner behind Warner Springs? Those are just two of many examples.

 Join your History Seeker as I reveal the people behind the place-names for my talk, “Who Were Those People?” on Wednesday, July 8 at 10 a.m. at Oasis Rancho Bernardo Lifelong Learning Center. Click on the link below to sign up:

https://san-diego.oasiseverywhere.org/product/who-were-those-people-2

Here’s a verbal snapshot of a part of our county from a different time. Below is an excerpt from the front page of The San Diego Union of January 16, 1877, presenting a summary of San Diego County’s agricultural output for the previous year. This clip covers El Cajon, or as they referred to it then, the “El Cajon Rancho,” but the language and descriptions were similar for all the communities covered in terms of what was then a predominantly rural county where the livestock still outnumbered the humans. Note the number of horses, cattle, sheep and hogs versus the 90 humans. As of the 2020 U.S. Census, the population of the city of El Cajon stood at 106,215! Have a good read and then, take a walk outside and look around you.

Accounts of San Diego becoming a Navy town usually begin with the creation of Naval Base San Diego in 1922. With its fine natural harbor, San Diego and its residents were welcoming navies going back to the Spanish. U.S. Navy ships were already a big attraction in the late 1800s, as evidenced by reports in local newspapers in February 1896.

In an article headlined, “Excursion to San Diego,” The Escondido Times-Advocate of Friday, February 7, 1896, reported “The U.S. warships, Philadelphia, Albatross and Monterey, will be in San Diego on Saturday, February 8th, on which date the Southern California Railway will sell tickets at one fare for the round trip, with return limit of February 18th.”

Here’s an 1893 Currier and Ives print of the USS Philadelphia, courtesy of the Library of Congress:

The Philadelphia, The Times-Advocate noted, “is one of the largest war vessels ever in San Diego Harbor, and it is expected will attract a large number of visitors. There will be a grand naval and military parade at 2:30 p.m. and a grand military ball at Coronado on the evening of the 8th.”

The San Diego Sun, in its issue also dated Friday, the 7th, perhaps because it was a little closer to the action, reported that all the ships had apparently arrived in the early hours of Friday morning, the Monterey arriving “at Point Loma this morning at 4. After daylight she was brought into the harbor. When off beacon No. 6, the Monterey fired a salute in recognition of the flagship Philadelphia, and a few moments later both the Philadelphia and Albatross fired a reply of seven guns.” The volley from the ships, the Sun noted, “brought a great many people to the water front and the wharves were crowded even before the monitor [referring to the Monterey] had anchored.”

A separate article in the Sun on the planned parade and ball, regarding the number of out-of-town visitors expected,  reported that “the Southern California  people say they expect from 600 to 800, from what they hear,” and that “over 400 tickets have already been issued” for the ball at the Hotel del Coronado.