The land

The first people

The Tongva established Chowigna on the south side of what would later be named the Palos Verdes Peninsula approximately 7,100 years ago. The site they chose — a shallow sheltered cove with a year-round freshwater spring, a rocky intertidal zone abundant in abalone, and a high bluff for visibility — sustained a village that persisted through the Spanish and Mexican periods. Shell middens at Chowigna remain visible today at Abalone Cove Park. A Tongva monument was erected at the park in 2021.

The Tongva left no enclosures, no declarations, no recorded instruments in the sense those words would mean a few centuries later. They did leave the shells.

The first grants

In 1542, Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo named the waters off the peninsula the Bay of Smokes, after the fires the Tongva were burning on the bluffs. The Spanish Crown would not issue a private land grant on this land for another 242 years. When it did, in 1784, Governor Fages awarded Rancho San Pedro to Juan José Dominguez — a veteran of the Portolá expedition. Col. Robert M. Baughey, writing for the Palos Verdes Corporation in the Palos Verdes News tenth-anniversary issue in 1947, called the grant "the first conception in our state of the use of sovereign land for private use" and "the first 'soldier's bonus' ever granted in California." Rancho San Pedro ran from the Los Angeles River basin to the sea and covered roughly 67.5 square miles, including the modern cities of Redondo Beach, Gardena, Torrance, Lomita, part of Compton, San Pedro, and Wilmington.

The Sepúlveda family pressed their own claim during the Mexican period. Governor Figueroa issued a provisional grant in 1827, and Governor Pío Pico confirmed it in June 1846 — twenty-three days before the United States flag was raised at Monterey. The US Land Commission sustained the Sepúlveda title in December 1853. The peninsula's southern half became Rancho Palos Verdes.

Lot H

In 1882, a Los Angeles Superior Court partition suit, Bixby et al. vs. Bent et al. (Case No. 2373), awarded the bulk of Rancho Palos Verdes — 16,002 acres — to Jotham Bixby and his syndicate. The partition map prepared for that case labeled the coastal south half as Lot H. Every tract, every subdivision, every road dedication, every park on the south peninsula for the next 140 years would be carved out of Lot H.

The name persists. When a modern deed in the Abalone Cove area reads "a portion of Lot H of the Rancho Los Palos Verdes, per Superior Court Case No. 2373," it is referring to this map, this court decree, this 1882 afternoon in Los Angeles.

Jotham Bixby held the land for thirty years. In 1912, his cousin Fred H. Bixby bought the El Cojo Ranch adjoining Hollister Ranch in Santa Barbara County — a separate deal, a separate coastline, but a record of the same family investing in two of the most contested pieces of undeveloped California coast. The parallel mattered later.

What this era left behind

Two things. First, a place name — Chowigna, still visible in the shell middens at the cove — and the reality that a continuous human occupation of this coast began long before any of the instruments in the next nine eras. Second, a bounded parcel called Lot H, whose boundary lines the Foundation still traces in every modern record on the south peninsula. Declaration 100, recorded in 1929, recites Lot H as its subject. The 1949 Declaration of Easements for Tract 14649 recites Lot H as its subject. The 2026 chain-of-title for 0 Clipper Road recites Lot H as its subject. When the Foundation says "this land has never been built on for a reason," the first reason is that this land was walked, fished, and cared for by people whose claim to it predates any of the paperwork.