Orange Park Trails

Orange Park Trails is 186 addresses on 81 acres of large lot hillside, zoned single family on 20,000 square feet across 69 acres and on 40,000 across another 11, with a median parcel of 0.211 acres. The street names read as one idea and were dedicated with the tract maps: Buckskin Way, Roundup Way, Golden Spur Way, Outrider Street, Wrangler Circle, Dapple Circle, Silverbit Way, Pony Court, Criollo Circle, Saddlehorn Way and Pinto Way, with Chandler Ranch Road and Calle Alta at the edges.

A mile and a half of the City of Orange recreation trail network runs inside the boundary, and the equestrian easements shown on the original maps were dedicated to the city rather than kept private. The general plan sets 18 of the 81 acres aside as open space. None of the addresses carries a unit designator, so the housing is detached throughout. Every parcel here is assigned to Chapman Hills Elementary, Santiago Charter Middle and El Modena High.

The ground is Orange Park Acres, which begins with Ferdinand Kiefhaber buying a 2,000 acre farm in 1894 out of the old Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana. About 800 acres of that farm became the equestrian district, developed from a corporation formed by Frank Mead Jr and Mervin Monnette after the Kiefhabers sold in 1911. Chandler Ranch Road still carries the name of the ranch this particular piece came out of, and until the 1970s the surrounding land was groves and grazing.

The neighborhood itself went in as High Horse Trails, which in 1979 added 140 homes and an equestrian facility to Orange Park Acres and was then annexed into the City of Orange. The riding trails through here connect into the wider Orange Park Acres network, and out to Santiago Oaks and Irvine Regional Park, the latter given to the county by James Irvine Jr for one dollar in 1897.