The Dodson Ranch was an 832 acre property once located here. The Dodson in question was James Hillsey Dodson (1861-1939), who would serve as both mayor and postmaster of San Pedro, but the ranch’s true owner was his wife Rudecinda Florencia Sepúlveda de Dodson (1858-1930) – yes, of the powerful Sepúlveda family. She had inherited the land from her father José Diego Sepúlveda, whose own father José Dolores Sepúlveda was granted 33,000 acres here in 1812. Rudecinda (we’re on a first-name basis) may have sold part of the land to her friend George H. Peck in 1897, as he laid out a short-lived Dodson Street (now Grand Ave.) on his “Rudecinda Tract” that year. In 1918, she sold the rest for $400,000 to the Averill brothers, who developed it as the Vista del Oro tract; Dodson Ave. was named in 1924. Rudecinda Sepúlveda Dodson was remembered as a modest but independent woman and a generous philanthropist. A middle school in Rancho Palos Verdes was named in her honor in 1960.
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