San Dimas is the Spanish variant of Saint Dismas, the penitent thief who was crucified next to Jesus. The old story goes that the name came to this region when Ygnacio Palomares (1811-1864), who owned this land in the mid 19th century, was besieged by thieves – penitent or not – who either stole or left his livestock in a nearby canyon. He thus dubbed the canyon “San Dimas” as a Catholic joke. True? I can’t say. A somewhat more plausible theory: someone told me that Palomares borrowed the name from the village of San Dimas in Durango, Mexico, his “ancestral hometown” – although his father actually hailed from Canelas, Durango, 70 miles northwest of that San Dimas over impassable mountains. At any rate, our canyon was named by 1871 – and presumably years earlier, if Palomares really was behind it. Meanwhile, the city of San Dimas started out around 1866 as the humble hamlet of Mud Springs, so-named for a nearby ciénega. It was rechristened San Dimas in 1887 (as was this street) by the San Jose Ranch Company, run by Moses L. Wicks and Howard W. Mills.
Find it on the map:
