New book covers the story of Temecula-Murrieta land owner Walter Vail – Press Enterprise

The man who once owned most of modern-day Temecula and Murrieta never lived here.

Walter Vail saw the place long ago and realized it would be a great place to graze cattle, not build subdivisions as has happened in the two cities since the 1980s.

While he never called our place home, about 250,000 people today do.

It’s one of the many insights in a new book about him that local historians Rebecca Farnbach and Jim Sappington helped write.

Farnbach has coauthored seven books about the area’s history, and she said she is Vail’s sixth cousin, three times removed. They share the mutual ancestor of Gov. William Bradford of the Mayflower Colony.

This is the first book for Sappington.

Five people tell the story of a man who left his home in New Jersey in the 1870s with $100. He struck it rich when he found a silver lode on his ranch in Arizona, according to the book, “Walter Vail: Arizona and California Rancher.” It was published last month by the Temecula Valley Historical Society and Empire Ranch Foundation.

Farnbach’s chapter 14, the last one of the book, is called “The Temecula Ranches.” She co-wrote it with Whitney Vail Wilkinson, Vail’s great-grandson. She said they revised and added to what another Vail relative wrote in the 1970s.

Sappington’s chapter 13, “Santa Rosa Island,” is about the site off the coast of Santa Barbara, which became yet another Vail ranch. It was 53,730 acres.

Vail’s ranch in Arizona covered about 100,000 acres, but a drought prompted him to move in the late 1880s to Warner Springs in San Diego County and rent land. Next, he saw the grasslands of our area and must have been captivated, for he bought 87,500 acres of what today would stretch roughly from Highway 79 South north to Clinton Keith Road, and about Camp Pendleton in the west and Vail Lake to the east.

“It would take a week for a man on horseback to ride the perimeter of the Vail holdings in the Temecula Valley,” Farnbach wrote.

She started the chapter with this quote from Vail about our area: “I never saw anything grow like things do in this country. Everything was as brown as your hat when we came and now everything is green and beautiful.”

The Vail empire eventually spanned about 1 million acres in Arizona, the Santa Rosa Island, and Los Angeles, Imperial, San Diego and Riverside counties. Once he owned the entire San Fernando Valley, Farnbach said. Yet another area that today is densely populated with people, not cattle.

He based his empire in Los Angeles. He died in 1906 after being crushed between two streetcars in downtown L.A., Farnbach said.

In our area, the Vail Company was the largest employer in the area for much of the 1900s and she said the local population stayed at about a couple hundred into the 1960s. The ranch’s headquarters are preserved in a shopping center on Temecula Parkway thanks to the strenuous efforts of Farnbach and her husband Darell, Dick Diamond, Rita Gentry, and others in the early 2000s. It is now a National Historic Site.

The Vail Ranch was sold about 60 years ago to a developer. “Everything looks new in Temecula because no land was available to purchase or be built upon until the sale of the ranch in 1964,” she wrote.

That sale and the completion of the 15 Freeway have brought wave after wave of development since the late 1980s.