Credits

Interviewee: Turnbull, Karen Wilson

Transcript: Hello, my name’s Karen Wilson Turnbull and I was born here in Orange County. I’m fourth generation Orange County and I wanted to reminisce about my neighbor Nellie Gail Moulton of the Moulton Ranch family. She lived next door to us down in South Laguna. I was in three arch bay, she lived next door but she was actually still on the Moulton Ranch. Her property was a little bit of a, a little zigzag on the property line map into the neighborhood and the cows from the Moulton Ranch were grazing her backyard and that was fun to go see. That property now is all Monarch Bay in Dana Point. Her husband, Louis Moulton, was a rancher and he owned a huge ranch out in El Toro and he acquired all the land that eventually became Laguna Woods, Leisure World, Laguna Niguel, and Monarch Bay and formed with his partner, Mr. Daguerre, one of the Basque farmers, and he formed the Moulton-Daguerre Ranch. And Mr. Moulton, according to Nellie, my neighbor, he acquired all the land that’s now Monarch Bay on the ocean front from a Mexican cowboy. He traded him his pair of silver embossed boots from Spain for 200 acres of ocean front and the man didn’t have any shoes and they traded right on the spot and that was the final piece in the jigsaw puzzle of making his ranch.