Jul 5, 2023 · By Erik Olsen

How Oranges Built Southern California

Before Hollywood and freeways, Southern California sold the world oranges. How navel and Valencia oranges, railroads and immigrant labor turned citrus into an industry that shaped the state.

Updated Oct 12, 2026

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Before Hollywood, before aerospace, before freeways, Southern California sold the world one thing above all: oranges. Millions of acres of groves, crate labels showing sunshine and snowcapped mountains, trainloads of fruit heading east. Citrus didn’t just make people rich here. It built the image of California as a sunny paradise that’s still pulling people in today. Here’s how it happened.

San Gabriel Mission

It started small, at the San Gabriel Mission, founded in 1771. The mission had big gardens, and around 1804 the padres planted what are thought to be California’s first orange trees, probably from seeds that came up from the missions in Baja California. Those trees had a long family history. Citrus originally comes from South and Southeast Asia and traveled to Spain long before Spain brought it to the Americas.

The business really began with one man. In 1841, William Wolfskill, a Kentucky-born trapper who had become a Mexican citizen and settled in Los Angeles, planted California’s first commercial orange grove on his land near what’s now downtown LA. He had started with grapes, but he figured the soil and sun could do more.

William Wolfskill

Wolfskill got his first trees from the San Gabriel Mission, and with careful farming and irrigation, his grove took off. His oranges got a reputation well beyond Los Angeles.

He’s called the father of California citrus, but when he died in 1866, oranges were still mostly a local business. There was no good way to get them to the rest of the country.

Valencia Oranges

Railroads changed that. The first transcontinental line, finished in 1869, ended in Northern California. Los Angeles got connected when the Southern Pacific arrived in 1876, and a second line, the Santa Fe, came in 1885, setting off a fare war and a land boom. Add refrigerated rail cars, and suddenly a California orange could reach New York in good shape.

From the 1880s through the early 1900s, citrus exploded, especially in Riverside, Los Angeles and Orange counties.

Orange groves cover the Southern California landscape early in the 20th century.

Riverside was the center of the navel orange business. In 1873, a resident named Eliza Tibbets planted two navel orange trees she’d gotten from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and one of them, the parent Washington navel orange tree, is still alive in Riverside today. Navels, sweet, seedless and easy to peel, were a national hit, and they turned Riverside from a small town into one of the richest cities per person in the country.

The navel orange is a California icon, but it actually came from Bahia, Brazil.

It started as a natural mutation on a single Selecta orange tree there in the early 1800s. The mutation makes a small second fruit grow at the blossom end of the main one, which gives it the “belly button.” The fruit was big, sweet and seedless, which also means every navel orange tree since then has been grown from cuttings of that original tree.

Navel Orange

The other big orange was the Valencia, and Orange County, which earned its name, was covered with them. At one point it was the biggest producer of Valencia oranges in the world.

Valencias are named for the city of Valencia in Spain, though like all citrus, their ancestors came from Asia.

They arrived in the U.S. in the 1800s and did great in Southern California. Best of all, they ripen from late spring through summer, while navels ripen in winter, so growers with both could ship oranges all year long.

It’s hard to picture now, but much of Los Angeles County was once orange groves, and those groves became the postcard image of California.

Someone had to pick all that fruit. At first, much of the work was done by Chinese immigrants. After the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, growers turned to Japanese immigrants, and later to workers from Mexico.

The work was hard and the pay was low, and there were strikes. The biggest was the citrus strike of 1936, when thousands of Mexican pickers walked off the job in Orange County and growers and police cracked down hard. Citrus is part of the history of farm labor and immigration in California as much as it’s part of the history of agriculture.

California’s growers also changed how farming worked. Their irrigation systems, pest control and marketing were copied around the world. Sunkist, the growers’ cooperative, basically invented the idea of advertising a fruit by brand.

There was always competition, from Florida and from Mediterranean growers, and trade rules and tastes kept shifting.

Most of the Southern California groves are gone now, paved over for houses and freeways, and the industry has largely moved to the San Joaquin Valley. But citrus is still worth billions to the state, and its history is everywhere, starting with the name Orange County.

California Citrus State Historical Park

If you want to see what it looked like, go to California Citrus State Historical Park in Riverside. It preserves working groves and tells the story of when citrus was king in Southern California. And then go get a real California navel orange in January. You’ll understand what all the fuss was about.