From deep roots in California’s history and soil, bred in an archetypal, pugnacious ranching family where everybody knew better than everybody, J.J. Hollister was known as a deft diplomat and renowned raconteur.
He grew up on his family’s storied Santa Anita Ranch, stretching along 17 miles of quintessential California coast, a pristine wilderness populated by wild animals, his grandfather’s white-faced Herefords, and vaqueros with Spanish names like Ortega, Pacheco, and Guevara. To the fiefdom’s north, the rocky, chaparral-carpeted Santa Ynez Mountains rose at Gaviota Pass and then faded west into Point Conception; on the south, channel waters shimmered past the kelp line to distant island scrims.
In the 1860s, his great-grandfather W.W. Hollister, together with business partner Thomas B. Dibblee, bought the coastal ranch from the Ortega family, Spanish soldiers who’d settled there in the 1790s. Their partnership, with Albert Dibblee, Thomas’s brother, ultimately included the coast ranches and the Lompoc, Mission Vieja, Espada, San Julian, Salsipuedes, and Las Cruces land grants — over 150,000 acres of Santa Barbara County.
