Planting, cultivating, and harvesting crops and maintaining livestock on the sprawling Irvine Ranch was difficult work sustained by superintendents, foremen, vaqueros, and farm hands who carried out the ranch’s daily labor. The ranch’s Mess Hall, Bunkhouse, and foremen’s cottages reflect the labor hierarchy of this agricultural workforce, with superintendents and foremen receiving modest family homes onsite while laborers and migrant workers, the lowest-paid employees, likely lived in communal dormitories with little privacy. In 1905, average monthly wages on the Irvine Ranch ranged from $8 for a ranch hand to $30 for a vaquero, who provided his own saddle and blanket, $40 for a cook, $50 for a blacksmith, and up to $75 for a cattle foreman. Beyond serving as employee housing and a dining hall, the preserved buildings also show elements of the early 20th-century Craftsman and Colonial Revival architectural styles, and Orange County contractor Chris McNeill, whose company built Santa Ana’s Old Orange County Courthouse, also built the Irvine Ranch Mess Hall and Bunkhouse.