Moorpark history:

Moorpark is a city of 47,342 people, in Southern California. It was founded in 1900 by Robert Poindexter, presumably named after the moorpark apricots that grew in the area. The city has experienced a great amount of growth since the late 1970s. The valley where Moorpark is located was originally inhabited by the Chumash. The area was part of the large Rancho Simi land grant given in 1795 to the Pico brothers (Javier, Patricio, and Miguel) By Governor Diego de Borica of Alta California.

Robert W. Poindexter, the secretary of the Simi Land Company, received the land that made up the original townsite of Moorpark when the association was disbanded in 1887. Moorpark was founded in 1900 when the application for a post office was submitted. The application lists that there was already a railroad depot in the town. The town grew after the 1904 completion of a 7,369-foot (2,246 m) tunnel through the Santa Susana Mountains, which allowed the Southern Pacific Railroad to establish a depot there, a depot which lasted until 1965.

Moorpark College opened on September 11, 1967. Moorpark College is one of the few colleges that features an Exotic Animal Training and Management Program.

Twenty years later, Moorpark was incorporated as a city on July 1, 1983.

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 deal of 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 that 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.

In 2006, the Moorpark city council seceded from the Ventura County library system to create their own city library system, much like nearby Thousand Oaks.

On February 28, 2006, a housing proposal, North Park Village, which would have added 1,680 houses on 3,586 acres (15 km2) in the north-east area of the city, was defeated by a landslide in a city election.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_California