The Gold Coast

46

… The first wave of American settlers trickled in by wagon from New Mexico, or came around the Horn in ships, or rode down from San Francisco after trying their luck in the gold rush. There weren’t very many of them. The first new town, Anaheim, was begun by a small group of Germans determined to grow grapes for wine. They arrived from San Francisco in 1859, and there were only a hundred or two of them. The town was platted in the middle of open cattle range, and so they put up a willow pole fence that took root and became a living wall of trees, a rectangle with four gates in it, one on each side. They dug a ditch five miles long to obtain water from the Santa Ana River. And they grew grapes.

The other towns followed quickly after the partitioning of the great ranchos. When the ranchos were broken up and sold off, the new owners made advertisements to sell the land, and started towns from scratch.

Some of the landowners were interested in the new ideas of social organization circulating at the time, and several of the towns began as utopian efforts in communalism: the Germans in Anaheim were a cooperative, the Quakers helped to found El Modena on Society principles, Garden Grove began as a temperance community, and Westminster was a religious commune. Later the Polish group led by the Modjeskas settled in Anaheim and began a separate little utopia, although it fell apart almost at once. El Toro was founded by some English, who made it another outpost of the Empire, celebrating Queen Victoria’s birthday and forming the first polo team in America: the British notion of utopia.

When the Southern Pacific Railroad extended from Los Angeles to Anaheim, a boom began that lasted through the 1870s. Santa Ana was founded, with lots sold at twenty to forty dollars apiece, when they weren’t given away. Two years later there were fifty houses erected in the town. East of Santa Ana, Tustin was founded by Columbus Tustin, and the rivalry between the two new villages for the spur rail line from Anaheim was intense. When Santa Ana won the spur, Tustin was destined to remain a village for many years, while Santa Ana went on to become the county seat.

Orange was founded by Andrew Glassell and Alfred Chapman, two lawyers who were active in the rancho-partitioning lawsuits, thus becoming rich in both land and money. The town began with sixty ten-acre lots, surrounding a forty-acre townsite.

Southwest of these towns, on the coast, the lumbermen James and Robert McFadden built a landing that became an important point for shipping. The wharf was known as McFadden’s Landing, and the town that grew around it was called Newport. The McFaddens had bought the land from the state for a dollar an acre.

Soon towns had sprung up everywhere across the county. In Laguna Beach because of the pretty bay. In El Modena because there was good land for vineyards, and the water from Santiago Creek. In Fullerton because the train line passed that way. And so on. Developers bought pieces of the ranchos, set out some streets, held a big party and brought out some of the crowds arriving in Los Angeles for a free lunch and a sales pitch. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Towns like Yorba, Hewes Park, McPherson, Fairview, Olinda, Saint James, Atwood, Carlton, Catalina-on-the-Main, and Smeltzer, didn’t last much longer then their opening days. Others, like Buena Park, Capistrano Beach, Villa Park, Placentia, Huntington Beach, Corona del Mar, and Costa Mesa, survived and grew.

In 1887 this growth was accelerated when the Santa Fe Railroad completed a line across the continent to Los Angeles and immediately began a rate war with the Southern Pacific, which had been the only line. Fares that had been $125 from Omaha plunged to a rate war special of $1 before leveling off at around $25 for a year or two. The trickle of settlers became a small flood, and sixty towns were founded in forty years.

The only area of Orange County that did not experience this blossoming of towns was the great landholding of James Irvine. Irvine came penniless from England to San Francisco during the gold rush, and engaged in land speculation in the city until he was rich. Then he and his partners moved to southern California, and they bought the entirety of the old Ranchos San Joaquín and Lomas de Santiago, which meant that, after Irvine bought out his partners, he owned one-fifth of all the land in Orange County, in a broad band that extended from the ocean far into the Santa Ana Mountains. His land crossed all the possible train routes from Los Angeles to San Diego, and he was powerful enough to hold off the Southern Pacific Railroad, which could be said of no one else in the state; his ranchers fought off forced efforts by the Southern Pacific construction crews to push a line through, and he granted permission of passage to the Santa Fe Railroad just so he could balk Southern Pacific for good.

The Irvine land itself was kept free of new towns, and after a decade or two of sheep ranching it was cultivated, in hay, wheat, oats, alfalfa, barley, and lima beans, and much later in orange groves. For a hundred years the marked distinction between the heavily developed northwestern half of Orange County, and the nearly empty southeastern half, was due to the 172 square miles of the Irvine Ranch, and Irvine and his heirs’ policy of keeping the land free.

In 1889 the county of Orange was carved out of Los Angeles County. With the help of some money slipped to legislators in Sacramento, the border was set at Coyote Creek rather than the San Gabriel River, so that when it came time to choose the county seat, Santa Ana was more central and was chosen over Anaheim. Anaheim’s citizens were very upset.

So the little towns grew, and the farms around them. Despite all the feverish land speculation and real estate development going on, the actual number of people involved was not great. The largest towns, Santa Ana and Anaheim, had populations of only a few thousand, and the newer towns were much smaller than that. Between each town were miles of open land, covered by farmland or the old range, head high in mustard. The roads were few, the little rail systems even fewer. Under the constant sun there was an ease to life that drew people from the east, but in small waves that grew very slowly in size. Publicists based in Los Angeles trumpeted the virtues of southern California; it was America’s own Mediterranean, the golden land by the sea. The new orange groves contributed to that image, and orange growing was sold as a middle-class agriculture, more socially and aesthetically pleasing than the giant isolated wheat and corn farms of the Midwest. And perhaps it was so, at first; though many a man found himself working his grove and another job as well, to pay the grove off.

An American life of Mediterranean ease: perhaps. Perhaps. But there were disasters, too. There were floods; once it rained every day for a month, and the entire plain, from the mountains to the sea, was covered with water. All the new adobe buildings of Anaheim were melted back to mud. And once there was an outbreak of smallpox that finished off the last of the Indians at San Juan Capistrano, which remained as a silent remnant of the mission past. And the crops failed often; brought in from afar and usually planted in monocultural style, the grapes, the walnuts, and even the oranges suffered from blights that killed thousands and thousands of plants.

But by and large it was a peaceful life here, at the Victorian end of the frontier. Under the hot sun Americans from the East arrived and started up new lives, and most were happy with the results. The years passed and new settlers kept arriving and starting little towns; but it was a big land and they were accommodated without much change or sign of their arrival; they disappeared into the groves, and life went on.

The new century arrived, and the sun-drenched life by the sea fell into a pattern that it seemed would never end. In 1905 the young Walter Johnson, pitching for Fullerton High School, struck out all twenty-seven batters in a game with Santa Ana High. In 1911 Barney Oldfield raced his car with a plane, and won. In 1912 Glenn Martin flew a plane he had built himself from Newport to Catalina, the longest flight over water ever. In fact you could say that Martin began the aeronautics industry in Orange County, by building a plane in a barn. But no one could guess what would come of that kind of ingenuity, that pleasure taken in the possibilities of the mechanical. At that time it, like life itself, seemed a marvelous game, played in the midst of a prosperous, sunny peace.

And all that—and all that—and all of that—

All that went away.