Chris Epting - Vanishing Orange County

Yorba Linda was an ideal place to grow many crops, such as alfalfa, asparagus, figs, potatoes, and walnuts. Orange and lemon groves, however, were the most popular agricultural products. As a result, the Yorba Linda Citrus Association was created in 1912. On June 29, 1929, the Yorba Linda Citrus Associations packinghouse was destroyed by fire.

The Garden Grove Mutual Packing Company, pictured around 1915, was founded by Alonzo Cook in 1874, and a school district and Methodist church were organized that year. The city existed as a small rural crossroads until the railroad arrived in 1905. With the large exportation of crops of oranges, walnuts, chili peppers, and later, strawberries, the town grew quickly. Tragically, the 1933 Long Beach earthquake destroyed much of the central business district, but the postWorld War II boom led, once again, to rapid development, and Garden Grove was incorporated as a city in 1956 with about 44,000 residents.

The Villa Park Orchards Association came of age with the citrus industry in Southern California. It was organized in 1912 by a small group of growers in east Orange County to harvest, pack, and market their citrus fruit. The association today has 350 members with acreage extending from Southern to Central California. Harvesting approximately four million field boxes of citrus annually, they operate packinghouses in Orange and Fillmore, California.

This c. 1930s image shows the Irvine Valencia Growers packinghouse, built in 1927 just southwest of the intersection of Jeffrey Road and Irvine Boulevard in Irvine. Irvine Valencia Growers, founded in 1926, is still in business, and the packinghouse still stands.

By 1910, the Irvine Ranch was thought to be Californias most productive farm and the states largest producer of beans and barley. As of 1930, when this image was taken, the ranchs crops ranged from beans, cauliflower, and barley to oranges, grapes, and papayas.

A 1940s agricultural plant in Santa Ana is shown above. Immigrant workers, particularly from Mexico, formed the backbone of much of Orange Countys agriculture industry throughout much of the 20th century. Its important to remember that working conditions were often unfairly harsh and the contributions of these workers too often goes unrecognized in the Orange County historical record.

Orange County got its name from the fruit, and that is why many postcards like these were produced back in the 1920s and 1930sto help promote the many fragrant, bountiful orchards that were common in so many of the countys cities and towns.

This is the Bastanchury Ranch in Fullerton around the 1920s, then called the Worlds Largest Orange Orchard. Domingo Bastanchury and his wife, Maria, were Basque immigrants who came to this area in 1870 and purchased land in the Fullerton hills for sheepherding. The Bastanchury family acquired more wealth during the oil boom of the 1920s, and at the peak of this familys success, its holdings were so extensive that all three railroadsthe Union Pacific, the Santa Fe, and the Pacific Electricran spur lines to the ranch house. Despite this success, their ranch went bankrupt during the 1930s. The area has since been developed.

This postcard promoted the agricultural services of J. E. Taylor and Company, one of the areas largest orange growers, around the turn of the 20th century.

Celery was long one of the most prosperous crops grown in Orange County, as this turn of the century postcard indicates. Celery was hard to grow and expensive to buy. Interestingly, back then celery stalks were often placed in elaborate vases, becoming the featured centerpiece of tables in well-to-do homes. In 1900, Orange County celery growers produced an eye-opening two crops a year, which allowed them to export 1,800 train carloads of the green gold annually.

In 1874, Lewis Moulton purchased a 22,000-acre area called Rancho Niguel from Don Juan Avila. Moulton and his partner, Jean Piedra Daguerre, used the ranch to raise sheep and cattle. The Moulton Ranch was eventually subdivided in the early 1960s, part of which is now recognized as Laguna Hills, incorporated as a city in 1991. This image of the Moulton Ranch is from the early 1900s.