From Swamp to Celery - A saga of the land

It must have seemed as if the world was ending or a new one beginning. The Old Man, Viejo Yorba, was dead. And the rivers of 1825 – Santa Ana and Los Angeles – raged so violently that they changed their courses and made islands and lakes in their path. Eighty-one, he had been: an iron man who had survived everything life had thrown at him and still rode fast and sat erect. The survivor was gone and the world wept into flood.

The Santa Ana River changed its course so dramatically that some 13,000 acres of the old Rancho Santiago came in to dispute. The river was cited in the 1810 grant “from the summit of the mountains on the northeast, the Santa Ana River on the west, the ocean on the south, and a line running from what is now Newport bay to a certain Red Hill...”

The rancho encompassed 62,000 acres. In the great flood of 1825, the Santa Ana River left its old channel at a point about three miles easterly of where Orange now stands and cut a new channel some distance southeasterly. Between the two channels were about 13,000 acres. The new U. S. deputy surveyor established the boundary now at the new channel, despite protests.

By the 1870s, squatters were everywhere on this land, cutting the timber and selling it. They'd heard it was now government land. Many court cases later at last determined that the land was either on one rancho or the other. It didn't “just grow” out of nothing. By the time the squatters could be legally evicted, the timber was gone.

Having flooded and only partially drained, this area was swampy with growths of tule, nettles, and willows: home to millions of geese and duck and a haven for hunters. The land was considered worthless until the Earl Fruit Co. hired E. A. Curtis to grow celery there. But no one locally knew anything about celery. Curtis took a trip to Los Angeles' Chinese community and struck a deal for $5000 – the Chinese to provide labor, implements, everything ( an early turnkey franchise, so to speak).

When the crop came in, the Earl Fruit Co. found itself shipping fifty cars worth to Kansas City and New York. The previous celery grown in California would not have filled even one boxcar; suddenly fifty! Later that number would grow to over a thousand boxcars a crop as Orange County possessed about 2500-3000 acres in celery. The Santa Fe Railroad even had a station there named: Celery.