Rancho Camulos  Rancho Camulos, now known as Rancho Camulos Museum, is a ranch located in the Santa Clara River Valley east of Piru, California and just north of the Santa Clara River, in Ventura County, California. It was the home of Ygnacio del Valle, a Californio "alcalde" of the Pueblo de Los Angeles in the 19th century and later elected member of the California State Assembly. The ranch was known as the Home of Ramona because it was widely believed to have been the setting of the popular 1884 novel "Ramona" by Helen Hunt Jackson. The novel helped to raise awareness about the Californio lifestyle and romanticized "the mission and rancho era of California history." The working ranch is a prime example of an early California rancho in its original rural setting. It was the source of the first commercially grown oranges in Ventura County. It is one of the few remaining citrus growers in Southern California. State Route 126 bisects the property, with most of the main buildings located south of the highway, and a few buildings on the north. The main adobe is one of the few extant Spanish Colonial buildings left in the state. Most of the other buildings are done in Mission Revival or Spanish Colonial Revival styles, both of which are derivatives of the original. Rancho Camulos is designated a National Historic Landmark, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and has also been designated as a California Historical Landmark. Many of the buildings and grounds are open to the public as a museum of this period in California history. In 1769, the Spanish Portola expedition, the first Europeans known to see inland areas of California, traveled downriver by boat and camped by the Santa Clara River on August 10. Their exact location is unknown but this area was later included in the territory of Rancho Camulos. Fray Juan Crespi, a Franciscan missionary traveling with the expedition, named the valley "Cañada de Santa Clara". The indigenous Tataviam people had a village here named "Kamulus" (meaning "juniper".) The area was used as early as 1804 by Mission San Fernando Rey de España for growing crops and as a grazing area for livestock. The population of this relatively isolated area (only traversed by the El Camino Real), as recorded by William Edward Petty Hartnell during his inspection of the mission in 1839, was 416. It was included in the Rancho San Francisco granted to Del Valle's father, Antonio del Valle, administrator of Mission San Fernando, by Governor Juan B. Alvarado on January 22, 1839, after the secularization of the missions.