Costa Mesa, California is a flourishing city of the arts that grew from humble beginnings into a world-renowned center for performance arts displays.
The land now known as Costa Mesa was originally part of Mission San Juan Capistrano, founded in 1776. The fertile grasslands in the area made it valuable grazing land for cattle.
In the early 1820s, an adobe shelter was built there for the cattle herders. Now called the Diego Sepulveda Adobe, the city restored and transformed it into a museum in Estancia Park. It’s the only building that still stands from that time period.
The Diego Sepúlveda Adobe, a California Historical Landmark in Costa Mesa, Calif., on Nov. 3, 2013. (Pelle68/Wikimedia Commons [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en)])Jose Antonio Yorba—one of the original members of the family that founded Yorba Linda—acquired the land in 1810 through a Spanish land grant. However, other settlers began buying portions of the land after California was annexed by the United States….