Despite it being a major thoroughfare, details on the family that gave Colima Road its name are hard to pin down, due to spotty 19th century records and a tangle of variations on surnames. What is known is this: ranchero Tomás Sánchez Colima (c. 1800-?) owned all or some of Rancho Las Gertrudes by 1846 (while California was still Mexican territory), petitioned the U.S. government for his title in 1852, and finally received a patent for 3,696 acres in 1877. That doesn’t mean he was still alive at that point, or that that was the size of his original holdings. Indeed, portions of the “Colima tract” were sold off in the intervening years to buyers including banker Isaias W. Hellman, politician Drury Melone, and another Colima: Nicolás, Tomás’s son. An undated (1880s?) map indicated separate adobes in the Los Nietos area for Tomás and José Colima as well as one marked “Poyorena”. The Poyorena (a.k.a. Polloreno, Poyoreno, Pollorena) family also factors into the Colima saga, with no fewer than two intermarriages and one case of bad blood, in an 1878 incident in which Eduardo Poyorena gunned down Nicolás Colima on the way home from a saloon.
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