When Alfred Smiley arrived in 1889, Redlands was 8 years old, its first orange grove was 7, and a granite dam in the mountains already stored water for the orchards. Early Redlands history rests on that water, two rival railroads, and growers who packed and sold fruit together.
The Smileys' gift to the town was civic: a library and a park that still sit at its center.
Who founded Redlands?
Redlands dates to 1881, when E. G. Judson and Frank E. Brown planned and platted the town and named it for the color of its soil. According to the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, they promoted the Washington navel orange and recruited settlers to plant it.
The first grove in Redlands proper went in the next spring. The City of Redlands records that E. J. Waite, a native of Wisconsin, planted 2½ acres of oranges on Center Street in 1882.
A second settlement soon gave the town a commercial center. The "Chicago Colony" laid out the first downtown at Orange Street and what is now Redlands Boulevard in 1886, and an 1888 city ordinance required every future downtown building to be brick. Much of what follows about downtown comes from the 1991 National Register nomination for the Redlands depot district.
The dam that made the groves pay
Groves need a reliable water supply, and Frank Brown built one himself.
In 1884 Brown picked Bear Valley, high in the San Bernardino Mountains, as the site for a reservoir. He organized a company to buy the land and designed a single-arch masonry dam of granite. Brown was a graduate of Yale's engineering school, and his dam cost $75,000. It counted as one of the engineering marvels of its time, and the reservoir still gives Redlands a reliable source of water for homes and farms alike.
That water was the sales pitch. Easterners were drawn to Redlands "by the promise of profitable investment in orange groves and a plentiful supply of water," in the words of the 1991 filing. A grove was an investment, and the dam made the investment credible.
How the railroads shaped the town
Redlands had two railroads competing for its freight. After the Santa Fe arrived in 1888, a rate war with the Southern Pacific spurred the town's growth; the Southern Pacific opened its own depot in 1898. A Classical Revival Santa Fe station from 1909 still anchors the historic district on Orange Street.
The railroads also brought Chinese laborers to Redlands in the late 1800s to help build the lines. By 1922 the town's Chinatown was gone, and three of its surviving buildings on Oriental Avenue were adapted for citrus-related uses.
Packing houses and the growers' associations
The shipping numbers show how fast the groves took over. The City of Redlands counts 1,000 railroad cars of navels marketed in 1890. By 1904, the city says, the town shipped more than 9,000 rail cars of fruit from more than 30 packing houses.
Redlands packed its fruit cooperatively early, and it was the first town to form an association of growers, in 1888. Growers worked through associations, the associations worked through exchanges, and the exchanges acted as brokers to sell the fruit. Over the years the area had 29 growers' associations and five exchanges.
Packers built in a narrow band squeezed between the two rail lines, where being near both kept the railroads' prices competitive. Several of those buildings survive:
- the Haight Packing House at 345 North Fifth Street, 1890, a two-story red brick warehouse described in the nomination as one of the most monumental in Redlands;
- the J. J. Prendergast Packing House at 301 North Third Street, 1903;
- the Gregory Packing House on Oriental Avenue, built for Arthur Gregory's Gregory Fruit Company, founded in 1903;
- the Mutual Orange packing house, built in 1906 for the Redlands Mutual Orange Company.
That company's "Mutual Brand" crate label, dated to around 1906, survives in the Riverside Public Library and can be viewed on Calisphere. Labels like it put a packer's name on every crate. So, eventually, did stickers on the fruit itself: a Redlands grower filed a 1908 patent for putting a paper label directly on an orange, a story we told in our fruit sticker history. The town's fruit also went out in jars. Homer P. D. Kingsbury sold Redlands marmalade far beyond the region and was known as the Marmalade King, as we wrote in marmalade in California, from Redlands to the world.
Where the Smiley brothers fit in
Albert K. and Alfred H. Smiley were identical twins born in Maine in 1828. They had made their name back east with the Mohonk Mountain House, a resort at Lake Mohonk in New York. Redlands Community News reports that Alfred came to Redlands in 1889, following his son and hoping the climate would ease his rheumatism, and Albert followed.
The brothers bought about 200 acres south of town. They called the estate Canyon Crest; everyone else called it Smiley Heights. In 1897 they bought 16 acres downtown and gave them to the city for a library and park. Their A.K. Smiley Public Library, built in the Mission and Moorish Revival styles, was dedicated with Smiley Park on April 29, 1898. The library was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976.
Other newcomers built the commercial town. M. M. Phinney, a citrus grower, arrived in 1890 and went on to plan and finance most of the buildings on the west side of Orange Street.
What happened to the groves?
From the late 1800s to the late 1950s, Redlands sat at the heart of what the City of Redlands calls the largest navel orange producing region in the world. It became known as the Navel Orange Capital of the World.
The decline set in during the 1950s, when rising land prices made housing tracts worth more than orchards. By 1991, nine packing houses still stood between the two rail lines. The National Register nomination puts the number that operated in the Redlands area during the navel industry's heyday at 26, fewer than the city's count of more than 30 in 1904; the two sources don't explain the difference.
Redlands voted to hold on to some of what was left. In 1986, voters approved Measure O to fund buying and maintaining open space, citrus groves included. In 1996 the city created a seven-member Citrus Preservation Commission. The city estimates about 2,500 acres of citrus remain in production around Redlands, served by a single packing house.
We are one of the families still farming citrus here, with five generations of growing and packing behind us. Minneola tangelos have been part of our family's Redlands groves ever since the variety appeared in the 1930s, and we cook them down for our Minneola Tangelo Marmalade. The navel that made the town's name fills our Navel Orange Marmalade.
