Remember the Past, Challenge the Future

The City of Lake Forest is located in the heart of South Orange County and the beautiful Saddleback Valley. The City’s motto, “remember the past, challenge the future,” is the Lake Forest way of life. The rich heritage of the past is preserved and enhanced in this contemporary city ready to meet the challenges and opportunities of the future. Lake Forest was incorporated as a city in 1991 to help ensure that it will always be an ideal place for business to prosper and people to live, work and play.

Since being incorporated, Lake Forest has expanded its limits to include the communities of Foothill Ranch and Portola Hills. These newer communities are master planned developments that brought homes and commercial centers to the Eastern boundary of Lake Forest throughout the 1990’s.

Don Jose Serrano settled the area, which was originally called Rancho Canada De Los Alisos (the Valley of the Sycamores), through a Mexican Land Grant in 1846. The area then became known as El Toro, named after the bulls that roamed Don Jose Serrano’s ranch. For more than a century, the land remained with Don Jose and his family until financial problems forced him to turn the land over to private interests. In the early 1900’s, Dwight Whiting, a resident of the area, planted 400 acres of fast-growing eucalyptus trees in this growing agricultural community as an answer to the California lumber shortage.