Building Anaheim

The February 10th 1858 edition of the Sacramento Daily Union provides us with detailed information about the earliest construction of Anaheim.

It was begun by the Los Angeles Vineyard Company on one and a half by one and a quarter miles of property drawn from the ranchos of my 3rd great grand uncle Don Bernardo Yorba and the father-in-law of a 1st cousin, Don Pacifico Ontiveros.  The investors, mostly German, lived in San Francisco and named the property Anaheim; Ana fromt he Santa Ana River and heim, the German term for home.

The vineyard and grounds were fenced with some 40,000 poles eight feet long and surrounded by a "moat".  Water was brought  from the river in a zanja or ditch eleven feet wide, two and a half feet deep, and seven and a half miles long.  Adding water conductors and small ditches, Anaheim boasted some 336 miles of water conveyance.

The duty roster included: Seven men and fourteen horses with plows making ditches, a man with a two horse wagon to haul provisions and firewood, fourteen men, fourteen wagons, and fifty-six horses hauling fence wood, thirty three men digging ditches.  Overseers, cooks, and so forth brought the total employed to eighty-eight men, ten women, eighty-four horses for a cost of  just over $200 a day.

According to a newspaper account of the time, Anaheim prompted some of the rancho owners to invest in plows, too and begin sowing grain.  A grist mill was established about this same time on the Santa Ana River.

With Anaheim's industriousness, it grew and prospered.  Some 20 years later, the stories of its success reached far afield to Poland...and caught the eye and interest of a leading tragedienne: Madame Modjeska.