Carson Senior High School

Welcome to Carson High School, Where Excellence is the Expectation. . . CONGRATULATIONS to the incredible class of 2010!!! Fall Semester begins Monday, September 13th. We welcome incoming 9th graders, the CLASS OF 2014!!! Go Colts!!!

History of Carson

Our City's Native American Past

In the Watson Industrial Center in Carson, there is a bronze plaque near the southeast corner of 230th Street and Utility Way, next to the Pioneer building. Los Angeles Historical marker No. 13 commemorates the discovery of relics from our city's history, a story that began long before the arrival of the Spanish and other European explorers of the Southern California coastline.

The Suangna village of Native Americans once stood on this very spot, which is now surrounded by modern, high-tech factories. The site was once part of a large village complex occupying the inner harbor area. Native Americans like the Suangna (or Tongva) had established villages in the Rancho San Pedro area 6,000 years before the first white men arrived on the shores of Southern California.

Known to the Spanish as Gabrielino Indians (named after the Mission San Gabriel), they gathered shellfish, hunted wild game, and made a flour-like meal out of acorns from the oak trees which grew in the area. The Suangna villagers lived peacefully, traded with their neighbors, and made tools, weapons and grinding implements from stone and other natural materials. Many of these objects were discovered at this site in Carson, California.

      In 1784, the village became part of the Rancho San Pedro (more generally known as the Dominguez Rancho), with some of the Indians working at the ranch as vaqueros.

Our City's Spanish Rancho Heritage

     Although Carson is a young city - incorporated in 1968, it has a long and colorful history.

     Some 200 years earlier, in the 1760's, when the first European explorers set foot on Southern California soil, a Spanish soldier named Juan Jose Dominguez was part of the fabled Portola expedition. A few years later, when Franciscan missionaries began their journey on foot to establish the chain of California Missions, Juan Dominguez accompanied Father Junipero Serra as part of the small band of military men who helped to protect the padres.

      When Senor Dominguez retired in 1782, after thirty years of service, he was rewarded by a gift from the Spanish governor of California: the very first land grant in the history of California - a vast expanse of 75,000 acres of land, which he named Rancho San Pedro. It stretched from the Los Angeles river all the way west to the Pacific Ocean, encompassing what today would be the cities of Carson, Torrance, Redondo Beach, Lomita, Wilmington, and parts of San Pedro.

      The center of this vast landhold was the Dominguez Rancho homestead, located in what today is the eastern portion of Carson, known as Dominguez Hills. It is here that his nephew built the historic Dominguez Ranch Adobe in 1826, which still stands today as a proud monument to Carson's romantic past.

During the rancho period in Old California's history, vast herds of cattle roamed the hills and plains of the Los Angeles region, tended by vaqueros on horseback (cowboys, some of whom were recruited from the local Indian tribes), who marked the animals with the special lemon-shaped brand of the Dominguez Rancho.

The cattle hides were sold to ships which docked at the San Pedro harbor (as documented in Richard Henry Dana's masterpiece, "Two Years Before the Mast"), in return for dollars and merchandise the sailing ships brought from Europe. The rancho era lasted until the 1860's, when a disastrous series of droughts destroyed the cattle herds.