About Chino

Chino is a city in San Bernardino County, California, United States. It is located in the western end of the Riverside-San Bernardino Area and it is easily accessible via the Chino Valley (71) and Pomona (60) freeways.

Chino is bounded by Chino Hills to the west, unincorporated San Bernardino County (near Montclair) to the north, Ontario to the northeast, unincorporated San Bernardino County to the southeast, and unincorporated Riverside County to the south. The population was 77,983 at the 2010 census.

Chino and its surroundings have long been a center of agriculture and dairy farming, serving the considerable demands for milk products in Southern California and much of the southwestern United States. Chino's rich agricultural history dates back to the Spanish land grant forming Rancho Santa Ana del Chino. The area specialized in orchard, row crops and dairy. Downtown Chino is home to satellite branches of the San Bernardino County Library and Chaffey Community College, the Chino Community Theatre, the Chino Boxing Club and a weekly Farmer's Market. In 2008, the city of Chino was awarded the prestigious "100 Best Communities for Youth" award for the second time in three years. Chino hosted shooting events for the 1984 Summer Olympics at the Prado Olympic Shooting Park in the Prado Regional Park. Two California state prisons for adults (California Institution for Men and California Institution for Women), as well as the Heman G. Stark Youth Correctional Facility, lie within the city limits.

The land grant on which the town was founded was called Rancho Santa Ana del Chino. Santa Ana is Spanish for Saint Anne, but the exact meaning of "Chino" has been explained in different ways. One explanation is that the "Chino," (curly-haired person or mixed-race person) was the chief of the local Native American village. The president of the Chino Valley Historical Society, drawing on US Civil War-era letters, designates the "curl" referenced in the toponym as that at the top of the grama grass that abounded in the valley.

The first inhabitants of Chino in modern times were the Tongva, who had a settlement called Wapijangna in the Santa Ana River watershed. Some residents of Wapijanga were baptized at Mission San Gabriel, which was established in 1771. The Spanish crown claimed the land, at least nominally, until Mexican independence was finalized and possession fell to the Mexican government.

Some twenty years later, Mexican governor of Alta California Juan Bautista Alvarado granted Rancho Santa Ana del Chino to Antonio Maria Lugo of the prominent Lugo family. Two years later, his successor, Governor Micheltorena, granted an additional three leagues to Lugo's son-in-law Isaac Williams, who took charge of the rancho. Williams kept large quantities of horses and cattle, which attracted the envy of raiding Native Americans as well as unscrupulous whites. One of the latter was James Beckwourth, who, in 1840, posed as an otter hunter and stayed at Rancho Chino to determine the location of the area's animals, which he then reported to Walkara, the Ute mastermind of the raids.