Local city information for Orange, CA

The City of Orange is located in Orange County, California, United States. It is approximately 3 miles (6 kilometers) north of the county seat, Santa Ana. Orange is unusual in that many of the homes in its Old Town District were built prior to 1920; whereas many other cities in the region demolished such houses in the 1960s, Orange decided to preserve them. A small incorporated community of Villa Park is surrounded by the city of Orange.


Members of the Tongva and Juaneño/Luiseño nations long inhabited this area. After the 1769 expedition of Gaspar de Portolà, an expedition out of San Blas, Nayarit, Mexico, led by Father Junípero Serra, named the area Vallejo de Santa Ana (Valley of Saint Anne). On November 1, 1776, Mission San Juan Capistrano became the area's first permanent European settlement in Alta California, New Spain.

In 1801, the Spanish Empire granted to Jose Antonio Yorba, which he named Rancho San Antonio. Yorba's great rancho included the lands where the cities of Olive, Orange, Villa Park, Santa Ana, Tustin, Costa Mesa and Newport Beach stand today. Smaller ranchos evolved from this large rancho, including the Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana.

Don Juan Pablo Grijalva, a retired Spanish soldier and the area's first landowner, was granted permission in 1809 by the Spanish colonial government to establish a rancho in "the place of the Arroyo de Santiago."

After the Mexican-American war, Alta California was ceded to the United States by México with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, and though many Californios lost titles to their lands in the aftermath, Grijalva's descendants retained ownership through marriages to Anglo-Americans.

In 1869, Los Angeles attorneys Alfred Chapman and Andrew Glassell received, as payment for legal services, 1,385 acres (6 km²) of land from Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana, which they quickly subdivided into a one-square-mile town with numerous ten acre (40,000 m²) farm lots surrounding it. Originally the community was named Richland, but the town's application for a post office was denied in 1873, due to the fact that there was already a Richland in Sacramento County. According to California from the Conquistadores to the Legends of Laguna by Roeger W. Jones, Alfred Chapman (who wanted the name "Lemon"), Andrew Glassell (who favored "Orange"), and two other gentlemen (who pressed for "Olive" and "Walnut") played a hand of poker, and whoever won the game would get to rename the town. Glassell, whose birthplace was Orange County, Virginia (itself named not after the fruit, but after Prince William IV of Orange), won the game, and in January 1875, Richland was duly renamed Orange. The other suggested names were assigned to streets in the new town.

The small town was developed around a central Plaza in the form of a traffic circle (or "roundabout") which remains to this day, and was incorporated on April 6, 1888 under the general laws of the State of California. That Orange was the only city in Orange County to be planned and built around a Plaza, earned it the nickname Plaza City. Orange was the first developed town site to be served by the California Southern Railroad when the nation's second transcontinental rail line reached Orange County.

The town experienced its first growth spurt during the last decade of the 19th century (as did many of the surrounding communities), thanks to ever-increasing demands for California-grown citrus fruits, a period some refer to as the "Orange Era." Southern California's real estate "boom" of 1886-1888, fueled by railroad rate wars, also contributed to a marked increase in population. Like most cities in Orange County, agriculture formed the backbone of the local economy, and growth thereafter was slow and steady until the 1950s, when a second real estate boom spurred development. Inspired by the development of a region-wide freeway system which connected Los Angeles' urban center with outlying areas like Orange, large tracts of housing were developed from the 1950s to the early 1970s, and this continues today, albeit at a much slower pace, at the eastern edge of the City.

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