Brief History of Guadalupe

Guadalupe was named for ''Rancho de Guadalupe '' This was the name of the Patron Saint of Mexico.In 1840 Rancho de Guadalupe was part of Mexico. In the early 1860's lots of properties got lost because of drought that ruined the cattle raising. It was sold to the Estudillo family of San Francisco,who then sold it off to two brothers who had come from France in about the gold rush time.Their names were Victor and Theodore Leroy. By about the 1870 the Leroy brothers had done a lot for this town. They sold land for hotels, stores and houses, it was looking more and more like a town. Railroads were put up, with the railroads, there came immigrations. By1920's they had made packing sheds, and were shipping lots of vegetables all around the country.

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The Americans began to settle in the vicinity after the civil war. The first telegraph station in Santa Barbara County was at Guadalupe in 1870,and in 1873 the stagecoaches from the north began crossing the river at Guadalupe; the U.S. post office came the next year. For ten tears the town grew. Then, in 1882, most of the businessmen in Guadalupe moved their stores to Central City (Santa Maria). The Railroad from San Luis Obispo crossed the river nine miles east town, and that was too far away for good business . Later,when the Southern Pacific Railroad was building it's coast line toward Santa Barbara, it ignored Santa Maria in favor of Guadalupe . The Chinese railroad workers made a wild west town out of Guadalupe at the turn of the century. Many Chinese and Japanese still live in Guadalupe, as do many Swiss and Portuguese dairymen. Mexicans and Filipinos are also plentiful in Guadalupe;they mostly came to work in the sugar beet industry and vegetable farming.

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