Guadalupe today is one of the most picturesquely cosmopolitan towns in California. It's short main street consists of a series of tiny shops, pool halls, laundries, with signs above which proclaim they are operated by Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, and Italians . The post office almost appears to be the only strictly American business in the place.
The name is taken from that of the Rancho Guadalupe, granted in 1840 to Diego Olivera and Teodoro Arellanes. This holding was more than 30,000 acres; it extended along the coast for ten miles and inland eight.It was watered by the Santa Maria river, and blessed with a fine climate.
John Dunbar perhaps deserves the credit of starting the town. This hardy Scot had live a life of 52 years of adventure before he came to California having been a sailor on the lady Franklin expedition to the Arctic in the search of Sir John Franklin, in 1850, and a soldier in the Union army during the civil war.
By 1875, Guadalupe had two hotels,four stores , one drug store, livery stable, two meat markets, two blacksmith shops, a harness shops, Odd Fellows Hall , one public school of 60 children , and five saloons. The Methodist Episcopal Church South had a chapel and 42 members.
The town was really booming with 40,000 acres of wheat gleaming on the plains around it.
The post office was established March 28 ,1873 and John Dunbar, the first postmaster, was assigned a fixed compensation of $12 a year, but the postal business grew so rapidly that on the commission basis customary at that time, he received $536 for the year ended June 30,1875.
The two brown adobe houses, still standing side by side in the center of the town, were built by the original owners. Arellanes was a "very large, fine-looking man, of genial temper, and gentlemanly manners, locally a kind of ranchero prince.
About 1866 the ranch passed into the ownership of Jose Joaquin Estudillo and the following year his son-in law, John B.Ward, commenced the first farming operations on a small scale. He also built the first road from Point Sal to the rancho, a distance of nine miles.
Ward never finish the Fort Tejon road, but recived a grant of land at Point Sal on the basis of the stretch completed to Rancho Guadalupe and his claim that a natural
route existed the rest of the way to Fort Tejon. The Estudillo estate proved much involved, and the following year, 1868, Joel Clayton managed Guadalupe Rancho as receiver. He put 4000 acres under cultivation and produced a crop of wheat that astonished everyone. Soon after this, Ward sold his interest in the rancho and it was taken over by John Nugent.
Nugent was married to another of the Estudillo daughters. He sold his interest in the ranch to Theodore Leroy and a Rudolph Steindaugh became the resident agent. A colony of about twenty farmers bought parcels of land in 1872.