Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Spring Valley, CA

Spring Valley is an unincorporated census-designated place in San Diego County: it has no city government of its own and is governed directly by the county.

The 2020 census counted 30,998 residents in Spring Valley, up from 28,205 in 2010 and 26,663 in 2000, living in roughly 9,900 households.

Spring Valley is named for a natural spring that Spanish explorers called El Aguaje de San Jorge, St. George's Spring, while the Kumeyaay people knew the site as Meti, or Neti.

In 1863, Judge Augustus S. Ensworth claimed 160 acres around the spring and built a two-room adobe, the first house built by a white settler in eastern San Diego County.

That adobe survives as the Bancroft Ranch House on Memory Lane, a National Historic Landmark and California Historical Landmark No. 626 whose timbers were salvaged from the wrecked ship Clarissa Andrews; it is now a museum run by the Spring Valley Historical Society.

Rufus King Porter, son of Scientific American founder Rufus Porter, bought the ranch in 1865, and his daughter Rufina is credited with persuading him to rename the area Spring Valley in 1866.

Porter named nearby Mt. Helix in 1872 after the Helix aspersa snail he found on its slopes.

Historian Hubert Howe Bancroft bought the ranch in 1885 and expanded it into the 500-acre Helix Farms, which by the early 1900s was one of the largest olive ranches in Southern California; he did much of his historical writing there before his death in 1918.

Spring Valley's teenagers attend Mount Miguel High School, opened in 1957 and home of the Matadors, and Monte Vista High School, opened in 1961 and home of the Monarchs, both in the Grossmont Union High School District.

The Census Bureau counts the wider Spring Valley community as two separate census-designated places: Spring Valley and neighboring La Presa.