Presumably named for Daniel Gridley (1825-1898), who once owned substantial farmland out here. How substantial? Hard to say. It was written, more than a century after the fact, that Gridley purchased 1,600 acres of Rancho Los Coyotes from mega-landowner Abel Stearns in 1869. What I found was that Gridley bought 523 acres of said rancho in 1871 – one month after Stearns’s demise – from a Neil McSwain, then three years later picked up another 523 from Alfred Robinson, trustee of the Stearns estate. At any rate, Gridley was born in New York and came of age in Michigan, where he married his first wife Catherine. At the peak of the Gold Rush, they wagoned out to Placerville, where Daniel dabbled in hotels and mining. They relocated to Napa in 1856 to grow wheat and raise their six kids, then settled on their Artesia land in 1879. Catherine passed away four years later and Daniel soon took a new wife: Julia. The couple left Artesia for downtown Los Angeles in 1886. There was a so-called “Gridley Road” out here in 1882 but it might have been in a different location; I found no record of this Gridley Road until 1925. Bonus trivia: Daniel Gridley claimed to have been in Ford’s Theatre the night President Lincoln was assassinated.
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