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When King Carlos III of Spain 225 years ago gave his friend Juan José Dominguez 75,000 acres of empty land in the Viceroyalty of New Spain then called Alta California, neither man dreamed that one day the property named Rancho San Pedro would someday become a near neighbor to one of the planet’s great cities and a world center for sea and air transportation.
Alison Bruesehoff, center, shows ACSC visitors Rowena Ake and John Durant a mural of the 1910 Air Meet.
Aero Club members in September visited the historic ranch house built by Dominguez’s descendants in 1826. The Dominguez Rancho Adobe, today a museum open to the public, offers a view of how early California landowners lived and how part of the ranch played host in 1910 to the first major air show ever held in America. Exhibits in the museum highlight both ranch life and early aviation.
Alison Bruesehoff, museum executive director, told the ACSC visitors that the original ranch was so large that it included all of what is today the Port of Los Angeles. Although the ranch’s acreage shrank in later years, the Dominguez family—still owners of some of the land today—prospered from cattle ranching and the discovery of oil on the property, she said.
In the early 20th century, aircraft pioneer Glenn H. Curtiss and some associates began looking for a site in California to host what would be called an “air meet,” a flying exposition inspired by one held in France in 1909, the world’s first such event. A Dominguez in-law, Dr. Gregorio del Amo, offered some of the ranch land, located just south of Los Angeles, as the site for the air meet. It took place in January, 1910 and was hugely successful.
Today the Aero Club is working with the museum, Cal State University-Dominguez Hills and other organizations to plan a year-long series of events in 2010 to commemorate the air meet’s centennial. Details can be seen in the article on this website headlined “Aero Club Helping Plan Centennial…”
A website devoted to the 1910 event can be seen at www.csudh.edu/1910airmeet. More information about the Dominguez Rancho Adobe Museum can be found at its website, www.dominguezrancho.org.