page_title: Rancho La Ballona
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Rancho La Ballona / History
caption_attribution_description: English: 1902 Map of La Ballona and Port Ballona
context_page_description: Rancho La Ballona was a 13,920-acre Mexican land grant in the present-day Westside region of Los Angeles County, southern California.
  The rancho was confirmed by Alta California Governor Juan Alvarado in 1839, to Ygnacio and Augustin Machado and Felipe and Tomas Talamantes. The Machados and Talamantes had already been given a Spanish concession to graze their cattle on this land in 1819. Many Machado and Talamantes family members of the late 19th Century and early 20th Century are buried at the north edge of the former Mexican Rancho La Ballona at a cemetery at Pico Boulevard, which was known as the La Ballona Cemetery, later in 1876 as the Ballona Township Cemetery, and then as the Woodlawn Cemetery of Santa Monica in the early 20th Century.
  The grant stretched from inland to Santa Monica Bay, from present day Mar Vista, Westside Village, Palms, and Culver City; northwest to Pico Boulevard and the Ocean Park district of Santa Monica; and south along Ballona Creek through Venice, the Ballona Wetlands, and present day Marina del Rey, Playa Vista, and Playa Del Rey.
context_section_description: The grant stretched inland from the ocean into what is now Mar Vista, Westside Village, Palms, and Culver City and north to Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica, and south to Playa Del Rey.
  Augustin Machado and Felipe Talamantes were given a land permit in 1819 for Rancho de Los Quintos in Santa Barbara, but it turned out not to be profitable.
  In 1821 they applied again, joined by Augustin's brother Ygnacio, and Felipe's son Tomas. The military commander, José de la Guerra y Noriega, gave them permission to graze cattle on the future Rancho La Ballona lands, when they were living in the Pueblo de Los Ángeles. In 1839 Mexican Governor Alvarado confirmed the land grant for Rancho La Ballona to them.
  Port Ballona was a settlement on the rancho located at the mouth of Ballona Creek.
  The cession of California to the United States followed the Mexican–American War, and the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo promised that the existingland grants would be honored. In accordance with the Land Act of 1851, the Machados and Talamantes registered their claim for Rancho La Ballona with the Board of California Land Commissioners, and it was approved in 1854.  The US District Court upheld the decision on appeal in 1873, 8 years after Agustín Machado had died, and Rancho La Ballona was patented at 13,920 acres (56 km²) to the original four claimants.
  In 1857, Benjamin D. Wilson received title to one fourth of Rancho La Ballona on a foreclosure of a loan he had made to Tomas Talamantes in 1854.  Wilson sold his portion of Rancho La Ballona to George A. Sanford and John D. Young, who in 1863 had petitioned for a division of the lower Ballona Valley land. A decree dividing it into 23  sections was issued in 1868. Each of the 23 long narrow parcels was to have three types of land: "pasture", "irrigable"; and "bay" (Santa Monica Bay).  The largest allotment of the former rancho, on the bluff northwest of Ballona Valley to the boundary with Rancho San Vicente y Santa Monica, was to the "Estate of Augustin Machado",  and by a later partition in 1875 this allotment was re-divided among the "Heirs of Augustin Machado".
caption: Map of La Ballona and Port Ballona (1902).
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