Question: Who founded the area where Thomas O. Larkin was a businessman?
Context: Thomas Brown, (1738March 8, 1797) was an American colonial era husbandman, businessman, and land speculator.  Along with his brother Basil, he acquired the bulk of the (Brownsville) lands towards the end of the American Revolution from Thomas Cresap(Cresap's War, Lord Dunmore's War), early enough to "sell plots" to Jacob Bowman in 1780 and Jacob Yoder who respectively made business firsts in 1780 and 1782; Jacob Bowman founded a trading post and tavern.  Yoder got in a crop big enough to ship to New Orleans and invented the flat boat on Redstone Creek, inaugurating the water craft construction businesses which made the town an industrial powerhouse for the next seventy years. Tambling Wildlife Nature Conservation (TWNC) is a 45,000-hectare forest and 14,082-hectare marine conservation area on the southern tip of Sumatra.  The area is remote, with no public transportation available.  TWNC was founded by Tomy Winata, an Indonesian businessman and philanthropist.  Owner and chairman of the Artha Graha Group and Network, Winata also founded the nonprofit Artha Graha Peduli Foundation. Thomas Hall, built in 1905, is a historic building located in Murphree Area on the campus of the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida, United States.  The building is named for William Reuben Thomas, the Gainesville mayor and businessman responsible for bringing the University of Florida to Gainesville. The Thomas J. Pappas Schools were a series of related alternative schools located in the Phoenix, Arizona area.  A part of the Maricopa County Regional School District, the Thomas J. Pappas schools provided primary and secondary education to homeless children in the area.  They were named for Thomas J. Pappas, a prominent Phoenix businessman known for his strong support of homeless causes, who died in 1989.  The schools closed in 2008 following several years of controversy and legal issues surrounding the schools' administrator, Sandra Dowling, the Maricopa County Superintendent of Schools. La Loma Park is a tract of land located in the Berkeley Hills section of the city of Berkeley, California in the San Francisco Bay Area.  The Spanish word "loma" means "rise/low hill".  It was the property of Captain Richard Parks Thomas, a veteran of the Civil War and Berkeley businessman.  Today, it is entirely a residential area.  Although hilly throughout, its average elevation is about 614 feet (187 m). Thomas Oliver Larkin (September 16, 1802 – October 27, 1858) was an early American businessman in Alta California, and was appointed to be the United States' first and only consul to Mexican Alta California.  After the Mexican-American War ended in 1848, Larkin moved to San Francisco, and was a signer of the original California Constitution. University Circle Properties Development, Inc. (UCPD, Inc.) was a commercial property development corporation established in 1968 in Cleveland Ohio.  Located in the University Circle area at the famous intersection of Euclid Avenue and East 105th Street, the area came to be known colloquially during the 1960s and 1970s as "105 and Euclid" and "The Block".  Founded by a young African-American businessman, Winston E. Willis, UCPD, Inc. was the umbrella organization for a number of thriving businesses on the lower East side.  After operating successfully for over fifteen years, and following decades of courtroom confrontations and legal battles over property rights, UCPD, Inc. and all of its popular 105th and Euclid businesses were demolished in 1982 to make way for the continuing expansion of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation and numerous government sponsored redevelopment projects. Thomas Dachser (13 March 1906 in Haldenwang (near Günzburg) - 11 April 1979 in Munich) was a German businessman.  In 1930, he founded the forwarding agency Dachser in Kempten in the Allgäu.  Today the business, still owned by the family, is one of the largest logistics service providers in Europe.  In 1977, Thomas Dachser was awarded the Bavarian Order of Merit by the then prime minister of Bavaria Alfons Goppel. Alta California (English: Upper California ), founded in 1769 by Gaspar de Portolà, was a polity of New Spain, and, after the Mexican War of Independence in 1822, a territory of Mexico.  The region included all of the modern American states of California, Nevada, and Utah, and parts of Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico. The Thomas Edison Center at Menlo Park, also known as the Menlo Park Museum / Edison Memorial Tower, is a memorial to inventor and businessman Thomas Alva Edison, located in the Menlo Park area of Edison, Middlesex County, New Jersey, United States.  The tower was dedicated on February 11, 1938, on what would have been the inventor's 91st birthday.
Answer: Gaspar de Portolà