How Citrus Farming Became SoCal’s Main Squeeze

For many decades, visitors to Southern California spoke in awe of the miles and miles of citrus trees that dominated the horizon. The orange — particularly the Washington Navel Orange — was the region’s calling card from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century, driving economic growth, and becoming a key symbol of Californian prosperity.

Host Larry Mantle dove into this rich history on LAist’s daily news program, AirTalk, on 89.3 F.M.

"Navel" gazing

Discovered in Brazil, the Washington Navel orange made its way to California via the Department of Agriculture.

President Theodore Roosevelt replanting one of the first Washington Navel orange trees at the Mission Inn in Riverside.

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Courtesy Benjamin Jenkins

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University of Southern California Libraries/California Historical Society

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“Because of the climate, because of the soil, because of the water in the Riverside area, it became this winter ripening marvel, with a glorious orange rind,” said Vince Moses, CEO of VinCate and Associates, a museum and preservation consulting firm, and previous director of the Museum of Riverside. “By the mid 1880s, it had begun to supplant Mediterranean sweet oranges in California.”

Railroads and riches

“The railroad and the citrus groves sort of grew up together in the 1880s and 1890s as the railroads, in particular the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe Railroads — two transcontinental systems — started to lay tracks to places like Los Angeles, Pasadena, and especially Riverside,” said Benjamin Jenkins, associate professor of history and archivist at the University of La Verne and author of Octopus's Garden: How Railroads and Citrus Transformed Southern California.

A postcard of a train rolling through Southern California orange groves

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Courtesy Benjamin Jenkins

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The invention of refrigerated cars in the late 1800s meant that people in New York and Boston could purchase oranges that were grown in California, Jenkins added. Packing houses and orange groves sprang up along the train tracks in cities like Claremont, Anaheim and Riverside, incentivized by the profits earned from shipping oranges and lemons east.

The industry was so lucrative that Riverside became “the wealthiest city per capita in the entire United States because it had become the home of the Washington Naval Orange,” Moses said.

Kissed by the sun

Growers then banded together in 1893 to form the Southern California Fruit Exchange. It was “a cooperative incorporated to represent those growers and negotiate with the railroads and to create an organized manner in which they could pick, pack, and ship their fruit,” Moses said.

As it grew, the group became the California Fruit Growers Exchange, representing upward of 15,000 orange and lemon growers. The cooperative started branding their oranges “Sunkist” in 1909, which became the organization’s name in 1951. “They, in essence, branded the sun of Southern California,” Moses added.

A changing workforce

Before the 20th century, packing was done by Native American, Chinese, and other East Asian immigrant groups, “but over the course of the 20th century, as immigration into California accelerated, particularly in the wake of the Mexican Revolution, starting about 1911, Mexicans and Mexican Americans really became the dominant picking and packing forces in Southern California,” Jenkins said.

Workers would move depending on the season, picking Washington Navels in the winter and Valencias in the spring.

Citrus gets squeezed

“We can really date a lot of the downfall of the citrus industry to the early 1940s,” Jenkins explained.

Because of its position on the coast, Southern California was “an ideal place to build battleships [and] airplanes that would be used in the war against Japan.”

According to Jenkins, this shift meant the region needed new housing developments to accommodate all the people moving into the Southland to take part in the new defense industries. Citrus growers suddenly realized they were sitting on valuable real estate.

“A lot of orange growers decided to pull up stakes," Jenkins said. "They would maybe remove their orange trees to the Central Valley where they are still active today, and they would sell their land to housing developers to create tract homes.”

Seeds of history

Though citrus is no longer commercially viable in Southern California “it also has this strange grasp on the public imagination because we're not willing to let go of the vestiges of those communities, whether that's in the form of packing houses, or public murals that you'll see in many towns in the San Gabriel Valley or in the Inland Empire showing what orange groves used to look like,” Jenkins said.

Those hoping to dig further into the history of citrus in Southern California can visit California Citrus State Historic Park, which has 200 acres of commercial navel orange trees, as well as tours and a visitor center built as a replica of a packing house.

The entrance of the California Citrus State Historic Park in Riverside

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Courtesy Vincent Moses

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"The park is just a hallmark of Southern California and that industry that made this region's identity for so very long,” Moses said.

Listen to the conversation