Old Towne Orange
An early landholder in what is now central Orange County, Juan Pablo Grijalva, was a retired Spanish soldier who had marched through California with one of the early expeditions from Mexico. In 1801 he ranched the land from the Santa Ana River and the foothills above Villa Park to the sea at Newport Beach. After Grijalva’s death, the rancho was taken over by family who called it the Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana. When the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded California to the United States, the boundaries of the Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana reached from Riverside to the coast. However, one of Grijalva’s decendents used the rancho as collateral for business dealings and ultimately defaulted. The resulting lawsuit took two years to sort out and ultimately the rancho was divided into 1,000 units parceled out to the heirs and to the claimants in the lawsuit.
Two Los Angeles lawyers involved in the lawsuit, Alfred Chapman and Andrew Glassell, took some of their fees in land and decided to found a town called Richland on their land. Consequently the streets of Chapman and Glassell intersect to found the center of their new town which was located close enough to the Santa Ana river to have plenty of water.
In 1873, Richland’s application for a post office was refused because there was already a Richland in Sacramento County. In order to gain permission to open a post office, Richland had to change its town name and it’s believed that Chapman, Glassell and others gave the rights to rename the town to the winner of a poker game. Whoever won that game renamed the town Orange.
Like other budding towns, local farmers had to experiment season after season to determine which crops were best suited to the new area. Grapes grown for raisin production flourished until disease destroyed all of the vineyards. After attempting to grow bananas, pineapples and guavas, the famers realized that oranges were perfectly suited to the climate.
The boom of the 1880s led to the incorporation of the City of Orange it is said that the reason for the early incorporation was to prevent a saloon from coming to Orange. Consequently, one of the first ordinances passed was to prohibit the manufacture and sale of intoxicating beverages. Shortly thereafter, the southern half of Los Angeles County was split off to form Orange County. Both Anaheim and Orange had hopes of becoming the county seat, but that honor went to Santa Ana.
Today, Old Towne Orange is the county’s most well-known historic districts. The downtown core has numerous antique shops and is a renowned destination for shoppers who enjoy strolling past the many shops looking for historic treasures. The influence of nearby Chapman University is evident as college students frequent the coffee shops and restaurants and add an energetic vibe to the local scene.
Most of the homes in Old Towne Orange are modest bungalows and there are few flagship historic homes. This is because Orange never experienced an economic boom on the scale of other early cities such as Fullerton and Anaheim so there are few homes that were built by the extremely wealthy. However, the early recognition of the need to preserve the historic homes of Orange allowed the city to escape the mass housing redevelopment efforts of the 1960s that have compromised other historic districts. For this reason, Old Towne Orange has block after block of perfectly preserved historic homes that look much as they would have 80 years ago. This is the most known and sought after historic district in Orange County and property is always in high demand.
