A lady with a brand…cattle brand!

I love being a grandmother, but I often feel like I am operating at a disadvantage since both grandmothers died before my brother and I were born. Our paternal grandmother was Santa Monica resident Rita Reyes Lugo. She married José Mercurial Lugo, the son of Vicenta Lugo de Machado and Francisco Lugo in 1886. A photo in our family collection depicts an older Rita Reyes Lugo as a settled woman; her long white hair pulled back and around her neck, was a long necklace of black jets hanging over a dark dress.

Our father, Charles Reyes Lugo, was the last of her eight children, all of whom were raised on the Lugo Ranch that carried a Jefferson Boulevard address at her death in 1940. Sometime after our father’s death, I found a #10 envelope with my name on it. I guess our time in the historical society coaxed him to make sure we had some added information on our own family history. The envelope contained a hand-written letter (in Spanish) from our grandfather, Mercurial Lugo, to Antonio Reyes asking for the hand of Rita Reyes, dated 1886. In addition, there was another document, (1892) with a seal of the state of California, attesting to a cattle brand in the name of Rita Lugo, and a drawing of it— simply her initials, “RL.” The same cattle brand remains in the Lugo family, and when my younger niece was named Rita Lugo, she joined the ranks of our grandmothers’ strong great granddaughters. (And if she needs one, she already has a fitting cattle brand!)

In the end, this grandmother clearly took charge of the ranch for the seven years she lived after her husband’s death in 1933, if not before. As the wife of the “Zanjero” or water overseer of Ballona, she appeared to have been active on the ranch from early times.

In a local directory, dated just a year before her death, the entry for the Lugo Ranch address was listed as “Lugo, Rita R (wid Mercurial) rancher h 11010 Jefferson blvd.” The old directories give such an amazing amount of information, so helpful to researchers! After the Lugo Ranch was sold in the 1950s, our father, when he missed the place of his youth, often went over to the development that replaced it and happily enjoyed a cup of coffee at the Roll and Rye. The Lugo Ranch was marked as Historic Site #8 by the Culver City Historical Society.