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.