, owned by Don
José de la Guerra y Noriega, founder of the prominent
Guerra family of California.
Chumash people were the first to inhabit what is now known as Moorpark. A Chumash village, known as Quimisac (Kimishax), was located in today's
Happy Camp Canyon Regional Park. They were hunters and gatherers who often traveled between villages to trade. The village of Quimisac once controlled the local trade of fused
shale in the region. The area was later part of the large
Rancho Simi land grant given in 1795 to the Pico brothers by
Governor Diego de Borica of
Alta California. Robert W. Poindexter, the secretary of the Simi Land and Water Company, received the land when the association was disbanded. A map showing the townsite was prepared in November 1900. It was a resubdivision of the large lot subdivision known as Fremont, or Fremontville. An application for a post office was submitted on June 1, 1900, and approved by August of that year. The application noted that the town had a railroad depot. The reactor, called the
Sodium Reactor Experiment was built by the
Atomics International division of
North American Aviation at the nearby
Santa Susana Field Laboratory. The Sodium Reactor Experiment operated from 1957 to 1964 and produced 7.5
megawatts of
electrical power at a
Southern California Edison-supplied generating station.
Moorpark College opened on September 11, 1967. Moorpark College is one of the few colleges to feature an exotic animal training and management program. Moorpark was incorporated as a city on July 1, 1983. In 1996, Moorpark's Little League All-Star team represented the West Region in the Little League World Series in Williamsport, PA. In February 2005, a
Siberian tiger named Tuffy that escaped from a local residence was shot and killed in one of Moorpark's parks. This created a great uproar, because the
animal control officers used a gun instead of a
tranquilizer to kill the tiger, primarily because the tiger could not be shot from the proper angle for a tranquilizer to prove effective.
Candlelight vigils were held for the late Tuffy. The couple who owned the tiger had moved from a licensed facility in
Temecula, California, to an unlicensed facility in the Moorpark area of
Ventura County. They lost their
U.S. Department of Agriculture exhibitor license because they failed to notify the department of the move within 10 days. The wife pleaded guilty to a federal misdemeanor count of failing to maintain records of exotic felines. The husband pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice, making false statements and failing to maintain proper records. Each was sentenced to
home detention, three years
probation, and fined $900. Just a month later, in March 2005, the fairly complete remains (about 75%) of an unusually old
mammoth, possibly the rare southern mammoth (
Mammuthus meridionalis), were discovered in the foothills of Moorpark at the site of a housing development. The fossilized skeleton is believed to be from a 800,000 to 1.4 million years old mammoth, which is estimated to have had a weight of ten tons. On February 28, 2006, a housing proposal, North Park Village, which would have added 1,680 houses on in the northeast area of the city, was defeated by a landslide in a city election.
Egg City In 1961, Julius Goldman founded Egg City, the largest chicken ranch in the United States at the time, located just north of Moorpark. Many chicken coops were spread over acres of concrete, with millions of chickens in them. Local residents were somewhat irked by the farm, when the smell of it wafted to Moorpark on windy days. The odors also commonly flowed to the nearby town of Fillmore. The business suffered a setback in 1972, when millions of chickens were slaughtered because of the threat of
Newcastle disease. Egg gathering was done from 36 houses by hand, with workers placing eggs onto plastic flats while riding electric carts. Liquid, dry and shell eggs were processed at the hatchery facility warehouse, with yolk and albumen available individually. The farm finally closed in 1996. In early December 2006, a wildfire destroyed the dilapidated remains of Egg City. ==Geography==