The History and Development of the California Citrus Industry

This page continues the research mission of the original Citrus Roots archive, whose overview paper on the development of the California citrus industry was cited by university extension programs and agricultural researchers for years. The original document is no longer available; what follows is a new, original survey of the same ground, drawing on the institutional record preserved at the University of California, the state’s agricultural agencies, and the regional archives of the citrus belt.

Mission Beginnings, 1769–1840

Citrus arrived in California with the Franciscan missions. Seeds and seedlings carried north from Baja California and New Spain were planted in mission gardens beginning in the 1770s, and by the early 1800s Mission San Gabriel maintained the province’s first orchard of any real size — several hundred seedling orange trees grown for the mission table, not for trade. These were seedling fruit: thick-skinned, seedy, and variable, nothing like the commercial varieties that would later carry the state’s name around the world.

The mission era established two facts that would govern everything afterward. First, that the Southern California climate — frost-light winters, long dry summers, alluvial soils at the base of the mountains — suited citrus exceptionally well. Second, that citrus in California would always be an irrigated crop, dependent on captured water and the institutions built to move it.

The First Commercial Groves, 1841–1875

The industry’s conventional starting date is 1841, when William Wolfskill, a Kentucky-born trapper turned Los Angeles vintner, planted the first commercial orange grove in what is now downtown Los Angeles, using stock from the San Gabriel mission garden. The Gold Rush made the gamble pay: miners with scurvy and gold dust paid extraordinary prices for fresh fruit, and oranges shipped north to San Francisco commanded as much as a dollar apiece at the height of the boom. By the 1860s Wolfskill’s holdings had grown into the largest orange orchard in the United States.

Still, through the 1860s the industry remained small, local, and built on inferior seedling fruit. Two arrivals changed that.

The Washington Navel and the Riverside Experiment, 1873–1890

In 1873, Eliza Tibbets of the new colony settlement at Riverside received two small budded orange trees from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s propagating garden in Washington — stock of a seedless, winter-ripening Brazilian variety from Bahia. The fruit those trees produced, soon known as the Washington navel, was unlike anything then grown in the state: large, sweet, seedless, easy to peel, and strikingly handsome. Nearly every navel orange planted in California’s boom decades descends by budwood from the Riverside parent stock, and one of the original parent trees still stands in Riverside under state protection.

The navel solved the quality problem. The Southern Pacific’s arrival in Los Angeles in 1876 — followed by the Santa Fe in 1885 and the rate wars that briefly dropped transcontinental fares to a dollar — solved the distance problem. The first full carload of California oranges went east in 1877; by the late 1880s, ventilated and then ice-cooled rail cars were carrying Riverside fruit to Chicago and New York in marketable condition. The Valencia orange, a summer-ripening variety planted heavily in Orange and Ventura counties, complemented the winter navel and gave California something no competing region could offer: fresh oranges twelve months a year.

What followed was the citrus land boom of the 1880s — colony towns, water companies, and grove subdivisions from Pasadena to Redlands, a story told more fully in The Land Rush That Oranges Built.

Organization: The Cooperative Era, 1893–1945

The boom outran its marketing. Growers shipped on consignment to distant commission merchants, bore every loss, and watched middlemen take the margin in good years and disappear in bad ones. The response, after several failed attempts, came in 1893 with the founding of the Southern California Fruit Exchange — a grower-owned cooperative that pooled packing, shipping, and selling. Reorganized in 1905 as the California Fruit Growers Exchange, it eventually handled the majority of the state’s citrus crop and in 1908 introduced a consumer brand name for cooperative fruit: Sunkist.

The Exchange’s national advertising — the first sustained campaign ever run for a fresh fruit — taught Americans to drink orange juice, put fruit wrappers and crate labels on every grocery shelf, and made the orange a daily staple rather than a Christmas luxury. That campaign and its consequences are covered in How Sunkist Invented the Modern Food Brand.

Science organized alongside marketing. The University of California established its Citrus Experiment Station at Riverside in 1907, and its work on rootstocks, frost protection, pest control, and variety selection underpinned the industry for the next century. The station grew into today’s UC Riverside, whose Citrus Variety Collection maintains living trees of more than a thousand citrus varieties — one of the most important citrus germplasm collections in the world.

By the late 1930s the industry stood at its peak: on the order of three hundred thousand acres of oranges, lemons, and grapefruit, concentrated in a crescent of foothill communities from Pasadena through the San Gabriel Valley to Riverside, Redlands, and down through Orange County — the “citrus belt.” Packinghouses anchored nearly every town; the great freeze of January 1913 and the orchard heaters and wind machines it spawned were civic memory; and citrus stood among the most valuable agricultural enterprises in the United States.

Disease, War, and the Great Retreat, 1939–1980

Decline arrived from two directions at once. The first was biological: tristeza, the “quick decline” virus identified in Southern California orchards beginning in 1939, killed millions of trees grafted on the industry-standard sour orange rootstock and forced a long, costly conversion to tolerant rootstocks.

The second was real estate. The postwar population surge made a bearing orange grove worth far more as a subdivision than as a farm. Between the late 1940s and the 1970s, the citrus belt was systematically bought, bulldozed, and built over; Orange County kept the name and lost the groves. Growers took their capital over the Tehachapis and the Grapevine into the San Joaquin Valley — chiefly Tulare, Kern, and Fresno counties — where land was cheap, winters were workable, and the navel found a second home.

The Industry Today

California citrus did not disappear; it moved and changed shape. The San Joaquin Valley now produces the large majority of the state’s crop, with a coastal lemon industry in Ventura County and desert grapefruit and lemons in the Coachella and Imperial valleys. California dominates the national fresh-orange and lemon markets — Florida’s crop went overwhelmingly to juice — and the mandarin boom of the 2000s added a major new category. Current acreage and production statistics are published annually by the California Department of Food and Agriculture.

The industry’s defining modern challenge is huanglongbing (HLB, or citrus greening), a bacterial disease spread by the Asian citrus psyllid that has devastated Florida and has been detected in Southern California residential trees since 2012. Quarantines, psyllid control, and a statewide detection program — much of the science again centered at UC Riverside — are the present chapter of a two-century contest between California citrus and its pests.

Where the Heritage Survives

The physical world of the citrus belt survives in fragments: the working historic groves at California Citrus State Historic Park in Riverside, the parent navel tree at Magnolia and Arlington avenues, packinghouse buildings converted to new uses across the Inland Empire, and the archives, label collections, and library holdings at UC Riverside, Cal Poly Pomona, and CSU San Bernardino. This site’s history section documents that legacy piece by piece.

This is an original overview published by Citrus Roots. For primary sources and institutional collections, see our sources page.