Orange is a city located in northern Orange County, California. It is approximately 3 miles (4.8 km) north of the county seat, Santa Ana. Orange is peculiar in this region because many of the homes in its Old Town District were built before 1920. While many additional cities in the region demolished such houses in the 1960s, Orange granted to preserve them. The little city of Villa Park is amongst the city of Orange. The population of Orange was 139,911 as of 2020.

Members of the Tongva and Juaneño/Luiseño ethnic society long inhabited this area. After the 1769 expedition of Gaspar de Portolá, an expedition out of San Blas, Nayarit, Mexico, led by Father Junípero Serra, named the Place Vallejo de Santa Ana (Valley of Saint Anne). On November 1, 1776, Mission San Juan Capistrano became the area’s first long-lasting European treaty in Alta California, New Spain.

In 1801, the Spanish Empire approved 62,500 acres (253 km) to José Antonio Yorba, which he named Rancho San Antonio. Yorba’s great rancho included the lands where the cities of Olive, Orange, El Modena, Villa Park, Santa Ana, Tustin, Costa Mesa and Newport Beach stand today. Smaller ranchos evolved from this large rancho, including the Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana.^{[citation needed]}

Don Juan Pablo Grijalva, a retired known Spanish soldier and the area’s first landowner, was granted permission in 1809 by the Spanish colonial government to avow a rancho in “the place of the Arroyo de Santiago“.