The following is from a work-in-progress about the history of Fullerton. Visit http://www.fullertonhistory.com to read more.

Corner of Spadra (now Harbor) and Commonwealth, 1888.
Photo courtesy of the Fullerton Public Library Local History Room.

The City of Fullerton was founded in the year 1887. This was a crucial year in the history of Southern California, as it was the peak of a massive land and population boom. In the span of just two years (1887 to 1889), over sixty new towns were established in Southern California and an estimated 2,000,000 new people arrived in the region. In his book The Boom of the Eighties in Southern California, Dr. Glenn Dumke explains there were at least three main causes of the boom–agricultural expansion, a rate war between rail companies, and extensive advertising and publicity by those seeking to profit from the boom.

In the mid-1880s, the Southern Pacific (SP) railroad was an extremely powerful economic and political force in California. The owners of the SP were known as the “Big Four” or “The Associates”: Leland Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins Jr., and Charles Crocker. However, in 1885, the competing Santa Fe Railroad completed a route to Los Angeles, bought up some local rail lines, and aimed to take the Southern Pacific head-on. As the two lines competed, passenger rates from Missouri Valley points to Southern California dropped from $125 to as low as $1.

“The result of this war,” wrote a local historian, “was to precipitate such a flow of migration, such an avalanche rushing madly to Southern California as I believe has no parallel.”

Fullerton Santa Fe Depot, 1888. Photo courtesy of the Fullerton Public Library Local History Room.

Another basic cause of the boom was the extensive advertising and publicity campaign which carried information about southern California to all parts of the world. This advertising took many forms ranging from railroad propaganda to newspaper stories and ads to letters from residents writing to their friends and families extolling the Golden State. While the boom of the 1880s spread throughout Southern California, its epicenter was Los Angeles.

Author Carey McWilliams describes a scene at the peak of the boom: “More than two thousand real estate agents paced the streets of Los Angeles, seizing lapels and filling the balmy air with windy verbiage. Business blocks sprang up like toadstools, and residences sprawled far beyond earlier city limits. Railroads, formerly sluggish, suddenly traced for themselves with lizard-like speed a complex network of trackage.”

Some of the land promotion took on a carnivalesque aspect.

“Men stood excitedly in line for days at a time in order to get the first choice of lots in a new subdivision. Flag-draped trains hauled flatcars jammed with enthusiastic prospects to undeveloped tracts far from centers of settlement. Exuberant auction sales, accompanied by brass bands and free lunches, helped sell $100,000,000 of Southern California real estate during the boom’s peak year,” McWilliams writes. “Unscrupulous promoters with empty pockets and frayed trousers bought on margin and found themselves quickly rolling in wealth, while old landowners who scoffed at the excitement were eventually sucked into the maelstrom and reduced to poverty. Empty fields and riverbeds and tracts of worthless desert land were platted solemnly into twenty-five foot lots–and sold.”

Some Los Angeles county towns that were created during the boom include Hollywood, Inglewood, Santa Monica, San Pedro, Catalina Island/Avalon, Alhambra, Pasadena, Glendale, Burbank, San Fernando, Pomona, and more. Orange County, which would break away from Los Angeles County in 1889, saw much subdivision and town-founding during the boom.

“The largest community [in Orange County] laid out during boom years–was Fullerton,” Dumke writes.

Fullerton was laid down by George and Edward Amerige, grain merchants from Boston, who subdivided 430 acres of land in conjunction with the Santa Fe Railroad and the Wilshire brothers. However, the Amerige brothers later explained that they didn’t get much benefit from the boom, as the railroad didn’t arrive until 1888, when the boom was dying down.

“Despite hopeful prognostications and repeated assurances by both buyers and sellers that the boom had come to stay, the spring of 1888 witnessed a rapid decline in land values and in buying enthusiasm,” Dumke writes.

Not all towns laid out during the boom survived; about half failed–short-lived towns with names like Rosecrans, Waterloo, Ramona, Rockdale, Ivanhoe, and Dundee. The history of California is a history of booms–the Gold Rush, the Boom of the 1880s, the 1920s, and the Post World War II boom.