San Marcos

One legend says a small band of Native Americans robbed the flocks of the San Luis Rey Mission in the late 18th century, then fled into the hills. Spanish troops chased them in 1797 and came upon a fertile valley. They named it Los Vallecitos de San Marcos, or Little Valleys of Saint Mark, after the day of discovery, April 25, St. Mark's Day.

On April 22, 1840, Governor Juan B. Alvarado granted Rancho Vallecitos de San Marcos to his relative, Jose María Alvarado. Jose was killed at the Pauma Massacre in 1846, and the land passed to his wife, who sold it to Lorenzo Soto. In the late 1850s Soto sold part of it to Cave Couts, whose family raised livestock there. The first permanent settler was someone else. Major Gustavus French Merriam, from Topeka, Kansas, homesteaded 160 acres in the north Twin Oaks Valley and began making wine and honey.

German and Dutch immigrants started arriving in the early 1880s. In 1883 John H. Barham founded the first town in the area, at what is now the southeast corner of Rancho Santa Fe Road and San Marcos Boulevard. Barham Drive carries his name. By 1884 his town had a post office, a blacksmith, a feed store and a weekly newspaper.

In 1887 the San Marcos Land Company bought almost all the former Couts land and divided it into tracts. The original town of San Marcos grew about a mile north of Barham, at what is now Grand Avenue and Rancho Santa Fe Road. That same year the Santa Fe Railroad announced it would run tracks through the valley. The citizens were disappointed when the tracks were laid one mile from the center of town.

Barham faded because it was too far from the railroad. Its school, started in 1886, moved to San Marcos three years later. San Marcos had its own stores, post office, blacksmith and depot by 1896. To avoid Barham's fate, the townspeople did something drastic in 1903. They picked up their homes and moved a couple of miles east along the tracks, to what is now Mission Road and Pico Avenue. By 1905 the town had rural mail delivery and telephone service. The Richland School, built that year, is now a wedding chapel on Woodland Parkway.

Farming was the main business into the early 20th century, and dairies and poultry became big in the mid-20th.

The turning point came in 1956, when the first water from the Colorado River arrived. Small businesses started up, and the population rose quickly to 2,500. San Marcos incorporated as a city on January 28, 1963.

By the 1970s it was the third fastest-growing city in the state, and the 1980 population was 17,479. It passed 30,000 in 1990 and neared 100,000 by 2020. The 2010 census had counted 83,781.

The city runs on a council-manager system with a separately elected mayor. Since 2018 the four council members have been elected by district rather than all at once on a single slate.

The city lists more than twenty named neighborhoods. Among them are San Elijo Hills, Twin Oaks Valley, Discovery Hills, Rancho Coronado, Santa Fe Hills, Stone Canyon, Richland, the Creek District, Old Creek Ranch and the University District. Lake San Marcos is on the list too, though it is unincorporated.

A few landmarks help with orientation. An illuminated cross on a hill above Lake San Marcos has been visible at night from much of the city for decades. A giant letter P, for Palomar, is painted on the hillside above the college campus and can be seen from miles away. The Williams Barn, also called the Red Barn, is a community center and reception hall built in 1952 to look like a big red barn. It stands in Walnut Grove Park in Twin Oaks, alongside historic houses from around the city that the San Marcos Historical Society looks after.

For walking and cycling there is the Discovery Creek Trail, which runs 1.1 miles along Discovery Creek from La Noche Drive to Lakeview Park. Riders face a 0.8-mile paved climb to reach the views.

Lake San Marcos is a separate place, not part of the city. It is an unincorporated community, counted as a census-designated place, and it is surrounded by the city of San Marcos. Its 2020 census population was 5,328, up from 4,437 in 2010. It covers 1.8 square miles, and it is a resort-based community built around a reservoir. The lake began as a body of water for irrigation and for watering cattle, and it is now used mainly for recreation and business. A concrete dam built between 1946 and 1951 created it.

The land was once part of Rancho Vallecitos de San Marcos, the 8,877-acre grant that Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado made on April 22, 1840, to Jose Maria Alvarado. Jose Maria married Lugarda Osuna, whose father, Don Juan Maria Osuna, owned the San Dieguito Rancho. Today a nonprofit, the Lake San Marcos Community Association, governs the community. It still relies on the city for public schools, the fire department, the Vallecitos Water District and the sheriff station. The community is much older than the city around it. The median age in 2020 was 63.3, and 46.9% of residents were 65 or older. The median household income in 2023 was $100,676.

Two colleges anchor the city. Palomar College's main campus covers 200 acres in northern San Marcos. It is a public two-year community college that enrolls about 30,000 full-time and part-time students and offers more than 250 associate degree and certificate programs. Its Boehm Gallery was dedicated as a not-for-profit art space in 1966. Cal State San Marcos, in the California State University system, was founded in 1989 on a 304-acre hillside in the southeastern part of the city. It enrolls about 14,000 students.

The San Marcos Unified School District is one of the county's largest, with more than 21,000 students. It has 11 elementary schools, 3 middle schools, 2 K-8 schools and 2 comprehensive high schools, San Marcos High School and Mission Hills High School, plus a charter high school and an adult school. High Tech High, a project-based charter school that began with a single school in 2000, sits across the street from San Marcos High School on San Marcos Boulevard.

Cal State San Marcos took a long road to its hillside, and its first class of 448 juniors and seniors did not arrive until the fall of 1990. Community leaders had pushed for a state university in North County since the 1960s, and in 1969 the CSU chancellor, Glenn S. Dumke, wrote that there was an ultimate need for one. In 1978 a satellite of San Diego State opened at Lincoln Junior High School in Vista with 148 students, and in 1982 it moved to an office building on Los Vallecitos Boulevard in San Marcos. By 1988 it had 1,250 students, and the CSU trustees paid $10.6 million for the future campus site, the 304-acre Prohoroff Poultry Farm. Governor George Deukmejian signed the law creating the university on September 1, 1989, making it the 21st campus in the CSU system.

Palomar College began in Vista. It opened on September 23, 1946, on the Vista High School campus with nine faculty members and exactly 100 students, and it moved to its current San Marcos campus in September 1950. By 1989 enrollment was around 24,000. The giant white P above the campus dates from that same fall of 1950, when a volunteer group of students led by an alumnus, Bill Tipton, hiked up the hillside with shovels, hoes and pickaxes and built the letter from white-painted rocks. The hill was heavily infested with rattlesnakes at the time. In May 2001 the college's governing board accepted a permanent trail easement to the letter, so it can be kept up as houses spread nearby.

San Marcos Unified is the fifth largest school district in San Diego County. Besides San Marcos, it serves sections of Vista, Escondido and Carlsbad and some unincorporated areas. Double Peak School and La Mirada Academy are its K-8 schools, and Foothills High School and Twin Oaks High School are its alternative high schools.

State Route 78 is the freeway into the city, with six interchanges. Rancho Santa Fe Road, San Marcos Boulevard, Twin Oaks Valley Road and Mission Road are county routes linking San Marcos to Vista, Carlsbad and Escondido. San Diego is roughly 35 miles to the south by way of Interstate 5 or Interstate 15 and Highway 78. The nearest major airport is in San Diego, and the nearest minor one is Palomar Airport in Carlsbad.

The Sprinter light rail stops at Palomar College, San Marcos Civic Center, Cal State San Marcos and Nordahl Road. BREEZE buses, also run by the North County Transit District, serve the city on lines 304, 305, 347, 353, 445 and 604.

The Sprinter line runs 22 miles between Oceanside and Escondido, with fifteen stations in four cities. It is the first passenger train on the old Escondido Branch since the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway stopped passenger service in 1946. The track was first laid in 1888, and it had to be rebuilt and raised to carry more traffic. The $477 million project opened to passengers on March 9, 2008. To serve Cal State San Marcos, the line leaves its usual route for an elevated viaduct, and that station sits on the northeast corner of the campus, deliberately close to the University Village Apartments. Trains come every 30 to 60 minutes.