The History of Chino Hills

Quick facts

Incorporated

December 1, 1991

Residents voted to break away from unincorporated San Bernardino County control and became California's newest city that year.

The land

Rancho Santa Ana del Chino

Granted in 1841 to Antonio María Lugo's son-in-law Isaac Williams, the rancho covered the flatlands and hills that became Chino and Chino Hills.

The name

The hills above Chino

Chino Hills sits in the rolling terrain between the Chino Valley dairy flats and Orange County, and took its name from the older town of Chino below it.

What built it

Cattle, dairy, then subdivisions

Grazing and dairy country for a century, Chino Hills stayed rural until the 1970s-80s suburban boom filled the hillsides with master-planned tract homes.

Size and setting

~45 square miles

Rolling hills between the Chino Valley and Orange County, anchored by the Puente-Chino Hills wildlife corridor and Chino Hills State Park.

Today

~78,000 residents

A San Bernardino County suburb known for its parks, its schools and its 2016 state basketball champions, the Ball brothers' Chino Hills Huskies.

Eight eras that made Chino Hills

1. Before 1841

   Tongva ground, not empty ground

   Long before ranchos or freeways, the hills and canyons that became Chino Hills were Tongva (Gabrielino) land, part of a wider territory that stretched across the Los Angeles basin and into the inland valleys. The canyons — Carbon Canyon among them — offered water, oak groves and game that made the area livable well before Spanish or Mexican land grants arrived. As with most of coastal and inland Southern California, colonization erased most visible trace of that occupation, but the natural corridors those communities used are the same ones that later became roads and later still became the Puente-Chino Hills wildlife corridor.

   • Tongva/Gabrielino homeland
   • Carbon Canyon water and oak groves
   • Pre-1841

2. 1841–1880

   Rancho Santa Ana del Chino

   In 1841 the Mexican governor granted Rancho Santa Ana del Chino — over 22,000 acres of the Chino Valley and surrounding hills — to Antonio María Lugo, who passed working control to his son-in-law Isaac Williams. Williams built an adobe headquarters and ran cattle across the grant, and the rancho became a waypoint on the trail between Los Angeles and points east. That role put it in the middle of the Mexican-American War: in September 1846 Californio forces attacked Isaac Williams's fortified adobe in what is remembered as the Battle of Chino, a skirmish that ended with the defenders' surrender but little bloodshed. American annexation of California in 1848 left the rancho's boundaries intact but opened the door to the land sales that followed.

   • Rancho granted 1841
   • Isaac Williams's adobe
   • Battle of Chino, September 1846

3. 1881–1900

   Richard Gird founds Chino and plants sugar beets

   In 1881 Richard Gird — flush with Tombstone silver money — bought the Chino portion of the old rancho and founded the town of Chino down in the valley, laying out streets, building the Chino Valley Railroad, and planting sugar beets to feed a new refinery. The hills above the valley stayed what they had always been: open cattle and dairy range, too steep and dry for beet fields, valuable mainly for grazing. That split — a planned agricultural town in the flats, undeveloped hill country above it — set the pattern that held for the next ninety years, with Chino Hills existing only as ranch land and place names rather than as a town of its own.

   • Richard Gird buys in, 1881
   • Chino Valley Railroad
   • Sugar beets in the flats, cattle in the hills

4. 1900s–1920s

   Resort golf and rural cabins arrive

   The hills gained their first recreational identity in this stretch. Los Serranos Country Club opened in 1925 as a golf resort that drew a Hollywood clientele down from Los Angeles for weekends in the country, its clubhouse and two courses becoming the area's first real landmark. In the same decade, small cabin communities went up in Carbon Canyon — Sleepy Hollow among them — as a rustic retreat within driving distance of the city. Boys Republic, a home and school for troubled youth, had already been founded in 1907 on a campus that would become one of the hills' longest-running institutions, known for its Della Robbia Christmas wreaths and for alumni including actor Steve McQueen.

   • Los Serranos Country Club, 1925
   • Sleepy Hollow cabins, Carbon Canyon
   • Boys Republic founded 1907

5. 1930s–1960s

   Dairy preserve country

   For decades the flats and lower hills around Chino were part of the Chino Dairy Preserve, one of the densest concentrations of dairy operations in the country, and the hills stayed cattle range and open grassland with a scattering of ranch homes. There was no incorporated town, no central commercial strip, and little reason for one — the land's value was agricultural, and the nearest services were down in Chino or over in Orange County. Carbon Canyon Road and the older ranch roads were the only real infrastructure. This was the last long stretch of Chino Hills as genuinely rural country before postwar Southern California came looking for buildable hillside.

   • Chino Dairy Preserve nearby
   • Cattle range, minimal development
   • Carbon Canyon Rd as the main route

6. 1970s–1991

   The master-planned boom, then a vote for independence

   Starting in the 1970s and accelerating through the 1980s, developers graded the hills into curving streets of tract homes, and Chino Hills grew from a scattering of ranches into a dense unincorporated suburb of tens of thousands of people — governed, awkwardly, directly by San Bernardino County rather than by a city hall of its own. Residents increasingly felt that county government wasn't responsive to local needs on roads, planning and services, and organized a cityhood drive. On November 5, 1991 voters approved incorporation, and Chino Hills became an independent city on December 1, 1991 — one of California's last big suburban cityhood votes of that era, and the moment local control over zoning, parks and public safety finally landed with Chino Hills itself.

   • 1970s-80s tract-home boom
   • Cityhood vote, Nov. 5, 1991
   • Incorporated December 1, 1991

7. 1984–1999

   A state park locks in the wild edge

   Even as rooftops spread across the hills, the steepest and least buildable terrain to the west was set aside: Chino Hills State Park was established in 1984, eventually protecting over 14,000 acres as the backbone of the Puente-Chino Hills wildlife corridor — one of the last unbroken links between the coast and the inland mountains for mountain lions and other wide-ranging species. The park's creation meant Chino Hills would grow up with a genuinely wild backyard rather than wall-to-wall suburb, a rare outcome for a fast-growing 1980s hillside community. Through the 1990s the young city built out its civic infrastructure — a government center, community parks, schools — to serve a population that kept climbing toward and past 60,000.

   • Chino Hills State Park est. 1984
   • Puente-Chino Hills wildlife corridor
   • Civic build-out through the 1990s

8. 2000–2016

   An earthquake, a wildfire, and a state title

   On July 29, 2008 a magnitude 5.4 earthquake centered almost directly under the city — the Chino Hills earthquake — rattled the region hard enough to be felt from Las Vegas to San Diego, and became the young city's signature natural-disaster memory even though damage was mostly minor. That November, the Freeway Complex Fire tore through Carbon Canyon and the surrounding hillsides, one of several fires over the years that have tested the canyon's older cabin communities. On the brighter side of the ledger, Chino Hills High School's basketball team — starring the Ball brothers, Lonzo, LiAngelo and LaMelo — won the 2016 CIF state championship, putting the city on the national sports map and drawing a wave of media attention to a school gym that had never seen anything like it.

   • M5.4 Chino Hills earthquake, July 2008
   • Freeway Complex Fire, Nov. 2008
   • 2016 CIF state basketball title

9. 2017–today

   A built-out suburb with its wild edge intact

   Chino Hills today is essentially fully built out — its hillsides carry the master-planned neighborhoods laid down from the 1980s onward, its commercial life centers on The Shoppes at Chino Hills, and its recreational identity runs through Chino Hills State Park, Carbon Canyon Regional Park's redwood grove, and a network of community parks and equestrian trails that reflect the area's ranching past. The population has leveled out near 78,000, growth is now mostly infill rather than open hillside, and the questions facing the city are the questions of a mature suburb: traffic on SR-71 and Grand Avenue, wildfire risk along the wildland edge, and how to keep the parks and open space that make Chino Hills different from denser neighbors intact for the next generation.

   • Built out around The Shoppes at Chino Hills
   • Chino Hills State Park as identity anchor
   • ~78,000 residents today

Lost landmarks

Chino Hills places that were real, mattered, and are gone — or gone as the thing they used to be.

Still standing

Chino Hills is a young city built on old ranch land — it lost most of its nineteenth-century fabric to cattle range and then lost the range to subdivisions. What survives survives because it is still being used: a golf club that still tees off, a state park that still runs wild, a youth campus that still enrolls students. Six places you can actually go.

Watch: two long-form histories

What Chino Hills looked like a long time ago

Four moments, four clips

Notable people from Chino Hills

Walk it yourself