The Brief

Nothing says summertime like children selling lemonade outside their homes. A paper cup of the sweetly tart concoction can be so refreshing on a sweltering summer day. And in Los Angeles, there is often an added bonus — the lemons are most likely local, picked from trees in the children’s own yards.

Lemons are so plentiful today that it's not uncommon to see baskets full of Lisbons, Meyers and Eurekas being offered for free in front of houses.

People unload them on their neighbors, having used as many as they can in lemon curd, lemon bars, lemon pies, homemade limoncello, and of course, lemonade.

But the lemon, and its big sister the orange, are much more than just fun fruits for home gardeners. The course of the citrus industry in California has dramatically shaped the state's economic fortunes and brought it worldwide acclaim as a bountiful Eden of health and happiness.

Mediterranean climate

A family picking lemons in 1928

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Orange and lemon seeds were first brought to California by Spanish missionaries colonizing the area in the late 18th century.

The Spanish soon discovered that the area’s Mediterranean climate, its mild winters and plentiful sunshine (most California lemons are harvested in winter and early spring), made it the ideal place to grow citrus. The Mission San Gabriel and Mission San Fernando had the most luscious groves, and its fruits were used to feed acolytes and keep illnesses like scurvy at bay.

However, from the start, the growth of citrus in California had an exploitative underbelly. “The Spanish may have brought the seeds and whatnot, but they made the Native Americans, whom they press-ganged into doing labor, actually plant and harvest and tend to the crops,” says Benjamin Jenkins, associate professor at the University of La Verne and author of Octopus’s Garden: How Railroads and Citrus Transformed Southern California.

 The commercialization of citrus began in 1831, when an enterprising French immigrant named Jean-Louis Vignes bought 104 acres of land just outside the original Pueblo de Los Angeles (now the Arts District) on the Los Angeles River. On his sprawling ranch, named El Aliso, he grew grapes to make his famed wines, as well as orange and lemon trees.

He soon had competition in the form of his neighbor, a former Kentucky fur trapper and cowboy named William Wolfskill. On his equally sprawling ranch, he grew grapes, oranges (he helped develop the famed Valencia orange) and lemons, and by the 1840s he had the largest citrus grove in North America.

Horse-drawn float of the Cahuenga Valley Lemon Association in a parade in Hollywood

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Los Angeles Public Library/Security Pacific National Bank Photo Collection

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The enormous volume and consistent quality of California citrus, and the fortune that could be made growing the fruits, soon caught the attention of visitors.

In much of the country lemons and oranges were a rare luxury, but here they were so plentiful their unmistakable scent filled the air. In 1870, an Eastern visitor to Los Angeles wrote an essay extolling the city in the Los Angeles Daily News:

Its climate cool, from the sea breezes, it is the most agreeable in the world, its soil productions beyond parallel. Immense vineyards, orange and lemon groves, give beauty to the landscape; and I can only say that if I had my life to begin, and had the talent… I should not hesitate to place myself there at once.

A lemon grove in Altadena

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Los Angeles Public Library/Security Pacific National Bank Photo Collection

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New varieties

Southern Californians also began to experiment with citrus, creating their own unique varieties. While the Lisbon lemon, a variety originally from Portugal, continued to grow in abundance, it was soon matched in popularity by the Eureka lemon, a thornless, everbearing and hearty variant propagated by Los Angeles nurseryman Thomas Garey in 1877.

So profitable was the citrus industry, according to Jenkins, that its produce was one of the main reasons that the major rail companies began to extend their lines to Los Angeles in the late 1800s.

And when they did, they chose to build their terminals and rail yards directly around the Wolfskill and Vignes’ properties, a logistics’ gold mine in terms of exporting citrus across the country. Soon, the area was swallowed up by the railroads, and citrus moved into open land elsewhere.

“California didn't invent the citrus industry in the United States,” Jenkins says. “But it definitely dominated by the time the railroads came in about the 1880s and 1890s.”

Women working in a lemon packing house, part of the California Fruit Growers Exchange

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Los Angeles Public Library/Security Pacific National Bank Photo Collection

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Boosters in Southern California saw the orange and lemon as powerful PR tools to entice sickly, wealthy Midwesterners and Eastern settlers in search of health and rejuvenation. Sanitariums, where you could recover from tuberculosis and other ailments in the sunshine and clear California air, began to open, and many of the patients, once healed, never left the state.

“If you were to look at newspaper accounts from Victorian California, from the Gilded Age advertisements, and correspondence people are sending back east, they’re absolutely thinking of California as a paradise, where in particular a lot of invalids come to try to heal themselves of consumption or tuberculosis or other lung problems,” Jenkins says.

“And part of the prescription that many of their doctors would tell them is that you spend some time in your sanitarium, but then you buy a little plot of land in California, you plant some oranges, and you get hopped up on vitamin C from maybe the lemonade that you're growing as well.”

The Cahuenga Suburban newspaper from 1896

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Los Angeles Public Library/Security Pacific National Bank collection

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The rise of Sunkist

In 1893, the Southern California Fruit Exchange, which is now known as Sunkist, was formed by a co-op of growers to help protect their assets and to lobby for California grown citrus. The powerful group (now based in Valencia) became a powerhouse in PR, placing advertising in paper and magazines across the country, promoting orange juice and lemonade as all-American staples.

“They promoted the idea that you should not only drink lemonade, but make sure that it's Sunkist made from lemons in California,” Jenkins says. “In The Saturday Evening Post or Ladies Home Journal they would have lavish illustrations showing a huge pitcher of lemonade with maybe a couple of lemons sitting next to it, touting the benefits of vitamin C and how it's like drinking a little bit of California sunshine.”

The campaigns were a brilliant success, and the consumption of lemonade across America spiked dramatically. The number of lemon trees also grew from 62,000 lemon bearing trees in 1882 to 800,000 trees by 1901.

The same year Sunkist formed, Limoneria, one of the first agribusinesses to tout the lemon as its primary crop, was founded in the Ventura town of Santa Paula. By 1908, it was known as “the greatest lemon ranch in the world.” That year, the Ventura Free Press reported:

A further increase in the size of the largest lemon plantation in the world...will be the result of planting this season at the Limoneira Ranch. There are now...27,000 bearing lemon trees on the property, and this year trees will be on 300 acres more. The crop last year was the largest since the planting has begun. Bigness is not the chief end kept in view by the management of the ranch. The growth of the enterprise, in fact, has come from never flagging efforts to maintain and improve the quality of the product.

But while many were making their fortune in the citrus business, the people who did the actual work in the groves were primarily poorly paid immigrants.

“The people who worked in these fields were primarily Chinese immigrants who had formerly worked for the railroads,” Jenkins says. “The Chinese were often made to live in railroad box cars because those were the houses that were available.”

As restrictions on Chinese immigration were passed, Korean, Japanese and European immigrants increasingly worked backbreaking days in the blazing sun, cultivating California’s dream fruits for the masses.

Photograph from the Valley Times dated December 22, 1962 shows Mrs. Ernest Ortega, from Reseda, holding a large lemon from her tree

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Los Angeles Public Library (Valley Times collection)

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Hollywood lemon groves

Citrus soon found a new booster when a director named Cecil B. DeMille came west in 1913 and leased a lemon grove in the small hamlet of Hollywood. There, his company shot The Squaw Man, the first feature-length movie filmed in Los Angeles, amongst the lemon trees.

According to Taschen’s beautiful new book The Gourmand’s Lemon: A Collection of Stories and Recipes, DeMille was not the only Hollywood pioneer to stake his claims on a citrus ranch.

In 1918, Charlie Chaplin opened his first studio in a lemon grove on Sunset and La Brea. “The silent star kept a few of the trees on his lot,” The Gourmand notes, “as evidenced by a goofy snippet of footage that shows him picking a lemon and pulling faces as he tries to eat it, skin and all.”

Even the lemon industry would be fodder for on screen hijinks. According to The Gourmand’s Lemon, in a 1923 short, entitled Oranges and Lemons, comedian Stan Laurel played a citrus worker trying to pack a citrus crate, while constantly being foiled by a wayward conveyer belt.

By the 1930s, California’s two most famous exports were films and citrus. They collided at the San Bernardino National Orange Show in 1939. According to Douglas Cazaux Sackman, author of the fascinating Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden, visitors to the expo were greeted by “manikins of Joan Crawford and Marlene Dietrich lolling in the lawn chairs among garden paths laid out with lemons and lolling in orange chairs among garden paths laid out with lemons and grapefruit, and pretty-boy Clark Gable in neat white flannels and open throat shirt under a fake orange tree glistening with two large golden globes.”

Movie stars also found that lemons, still plentiful though the major groves were long gone, aided them in their strict beauty regimens. “Tinseltown’s Golden Age sirens enjoyed their lemons off screen,” The Gourmand’s Lemon notes. “Rita Hayworth rinsed her hair with lemon juice, Joan Crawford rubbed elbows with it, Katharine Hepburn scrubbed her face with sugar and lemon, and Marlene Dietrich sucked on lemon wedges between takes, believing it would keep her facial muscles perfectly taut for the camera.”

Workers rights

In 1942, the Bracero agreement was reached, which permitted Mexican citizens to come to America as temporary workers in agriculture, and they began to dominate the citrus groves. “For a majority of these men working in the grove, they had to leave their families behind to live and work here,” says Jose Cabello, state interpreter at the California Citrus State Historic Park in Riverside. “Their homes were pretty dismal, hastily made and set up in fairgrounds, old warehouses, prison barracks, and sometimes even along the Santa Ana River.”

After WWII, urban sprawl, industrialization and a decline in the citrus industry pushed most of the remaining commercial groves out of Los Angeles and Orange County and into the Central Valley, where they remain to this day. But Sunkist would not be daunted and continued to promote California citrus products across the world, increasingly encouraging people to use lemons in new and novel ways.

“A lemon is not one product but a group of totally different products,” said Don Francisco, the marketing genius of Sunkist. “A lemon may be classed as a pie, a hair rinse, a cool drink, a hot drink, a garnish, a mouthwash, a vinegar or a skin bleach. The toilet and medicinal value of the lemon are alone sufficient to bring it fame.”

By the 1960s, the fight for farm workers’ rights spearheaded by the Agriculture Workers Association had begun to open Californian’s eyes to the inequity of Big-Ag. The lemon, once a symbol of youth and promise, began to be seen in a more sour, cynical light. In her 1966 essay Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream, Joan Didion wrote of a lemon grove that was “too lush, unsettlingly glossy, the greenery of nightmare.”

Today, the history of citrus in California can be best experienced at the California Citrus State Historic Park in Riverside. The lush, fragrant living museum is home to thousands of citrus trees and offers tours and educational programs documenting the history of citrus in the state, and the memories of those who worked in the field.

“We grow about 70 different types of citrus,” Cabello says. “And among those 70, about 12 of those are lemons.”

His favorite lemon in the park is the variegated pink Eureka lemon, created right here in California. “It's a very unique kind of lemon because as its name suggests, the fruity flesh on the inside is a pink color,” he says. “The lemons, as they're forming, theylook like little watermelons because the fruit has green stripes on it that you would expect a normal watermelon to have. So, this specific lemon is pretty sour. You would expect it to be. But I find them really delicious.”

Although most Angelenos now only see lemon trees in backyards and parks, California produced a 50-year high of 1.06 million tons in 2022-2023. So, next time you squeeze a lemon into your iced tea or over your hair for some natural summer highlights, remember — you are holding a bit of California history in your hands.