Presedential Collection

Presedential Collection, which is the spelling the City of Fullerton uses in its own association register, covers 34.8 acres above State College Boulevard and names its interior streets for presidents: Harrison Circle, Nixon Way, Taft Court and Tyler Drive, reached from Bastanchury Road and State College. The record holds 111 addresses on 109 parcels with 0.7 miles of private street. The city zones 31.91 acres R-1-7.2 One-Family Residential, where the minimum lot is 7,200 square feet, and holds 2.35 acres as Open Space View Park.

The general plan carries 34.27 of the acres as Greenbelt Concept. Mountain View Park is at 2601 North State College Boulevard, listed by the city with parking, picnic tables and a view point. Rolling Hills Elementary is 0.21 miles out at 554 students, Beechwood Elementary 0.95 miles at 872 in grades K through 8, and Troy High 1.21 miles at 2,504. No hazard layer the city publishes touches the boundary.

Domingo Bastanchury's sons turned the ranch from sheep to fruit around 1910 and planted some 3,000 acres of citrus, oranges and lemons and grapefruit along with walnuts, which was billed for a while as the largest holding of its kind in the world. They sank artesian wells and built a storage tank on Red Tank Hill, and they had a Japanese engineer lay the groves out on the contour to hold the water and the topsoil, close to the first contour planting done anywhere in the country. Then they bought 3,000 more acres of undeveloped citrus land in the 1920s, the Depression arrived before the young trees could pay for themselves, and the family lost the ranch. Part of what they surrendered turned out to be oil ground.

Houses reached this piece of the old ranch at the far end of that story. The Presedential Collection is a gated group of about 91 homes on the rise above State College Boulevard, reached from Bastanchury Road, with the association formed in 2001 and the houses finished in the two or three years after. The interior streets are named for presidents: Harrison Circle, Nixon Way, Taft Court and Tyler Drive. Nixon is the local one. He was born in 1913 in a house his father built on the family lemon ranch in Yorba Linda, a few miles east of here, and he is buried on that same piece of ground.