East Orange Park Acres

This is the rural east half of Orange Park Acres, 418 acres holding only 345 addresses on 9.49 miles of public street. The median parcel measures 0.520 acres, the largest of any community boundary on this site, and the general plan designates 242 acres estate residential at one to two dwellings per acre with a further 81 acres open space. A hundred and two acres are zoned single family on 40,000 square feet, 79 acres recreation open space and 37 acres public institution. None of the addresses carries a unit designator, so the housing is detached throughout.

The trails are the point. The city's recreation trail layer runs 3.28 miles inside the boundary and the bike trail layer another 1.51, and the Orange Park Association builds, maintains and insures a twenty mile trail system across the wider community. Santiago Oaks Regional Park, 1,028 acres, touches the boundary; Irvine Regional Park, 493 acres with ball fields, fishing and train rides, lies 649 feet away; and the 1,740 acre Weir Canyon Nature Preserve is 2,690 feet out. The street names run to horses, Arabian, Clydesdale and Mustang, alongside the family names Kennymead, Frank, Clark and Meads. Every parcel here is assigned to Linda Vista Elementary, Santiago Charter Middle and El Modena High.

In 1894 Ferdinand Kiefhaber bought a 2,000 acre farm carved out of Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana, and about 800 acres of it, sitting in the first valley at the top of the steep El Modena grade, became Orange Park Acres. The family sold in 1911 to a group that included the citrus man C.C. Chapman, Mervin Monnette and Frank Mead Sr, and in 1928 Frank Mead Jr and Monnette formed the Orange Park Acres Corporation to develop 640 acres of it. They drilled wells and started their own mutual water company, because nothing out here came with water attached.

The founding families are still on the street signs. Kennymead is named for Frank Mead Jr's mother, whose maiden name was Kenny, Frank for Mead himself, and Clark and Meads for others in the story. A second set of streets tells you what the place was for. Arabian, Mustang, Stallion, Clydesdale and Suffolk are all horse breeds, the last two being heavy draft horses, and Rocking Horse, Coyote and Wilderness fill in around them. Amapola is Spanish for poppy. Very little was built until after the Second World War, when this was oranges, lemons, avocados and egg ranches behind eucalyptus windbreaks.