Newbury Park

Newbury Park is a community that is located in the western portion of the city of Thousand Oaks and Casa Conejo, an unincorporated area of southeastern Ventura County’s Conejo Valley. Newbury Park is next to the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, with main entrances at the northern edge of the park at Rancho Sierra Vista & Satwiwa.

The community is served by the Thousand Oaks Library System with two libraries, the Grant R. Brimhall Library, the largest in the region, and the Newbury Park Branch Library.

The community contains two major new residential areas, Rancho Conejo Village (built on the site of the former Rancho Conejo Airport, where portions of the film It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World were filmed) and Dos Vientos Ranch. Rancho Conejo Village is still being developed by S&S Homes, while the master planned community of Dos Vientos Ranch has approached build out. The first planned community in Newbury Park is Casa Conejo, located in a roughly square-shaped unincorporated area, is the only remaining part of Newbury Park not governed by the City of Thousand Oaks.

Real estate prices in Newbury Park increased over 250% during the 1995–2005 ten-year period. Typical single-family house prices in the area and surrounding communities range from around $500,000 to $2.2 million in parts of the valley.

Area Schools

History

The area was inhabited by the Chumash beginning about 7,000 years ago. Newbury Park contains many ancient burial sites, most near the Santa Monica Mountains in the Southern portion of the community. Many artifacts have been discovered in the area.

Newbury Park is named after Egbert Starr Newbury, who owned thousands of acres of land in the Conejo Valley in the 1870s. John Edwards, Howard Mills, and Egbert Starr Newbury bought Rancho El Conejo land. Newbury and his wife Fannie moved to California from Michigan for health reasons in 1871. He became the first postmaster in the Conejo Valley in 1875. The post office was near their house which was located at the current location of the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza. The historic Stagecoach Inn was used by travelers between Los Angeles in the south and Santa Barbara to the north as a stagecoach station.

Along with Thousand Oaks, Newbury Park was part of a master planned community by the Janss Investment Company. Most of Newbury Park, along with the parts of Westlake Village located in Ventura County, became part of the City of Thousand Oaks sometime between the 1960s and 1970s. The annexed area was formerly controlled by Ventura County, but after a community vote, all but Casa Conejo became part of Thousand Oaks.

Newbury Park has had an increasing population due to the presence of biotechnology firms and technology corporations of the area, such as Amgen (world headquarters), Baxter, as well as numerous other tech businesses.

Information source: Wikipedia