Corona Celebrates 100 Years of History : Weekend Festival Includes Cinco de Mayo and Founders’ Day Events

Ceremonies honoring the city’s pioneer families and a parade marking Mexican liberation will highlight a weekend of celebration as Corona residents of varied backgrounds pay tribute to their city’s heritage.

Corona’s centennial celebration gets into full swing this weekend with Cinco de Mayo festivities along 6th Street today, and Founders’ Day activities at the Civic Center on Sunday.

Cinco de Mayo--May 5--marks the anniversary of an 1862 battle in which a badly outnumbered Mexican force defeated a French army to liberate Mexico. To mark the occasion, marching bands, community groups and Mexican dancers will parade down 6th Street beginning at 10 a.m. today.

The parade begins at St. Edward’s Church and passes eastward through the center of town to City Park, east of East Grand Boulevard. “After that, we’ll have entertainment at the park, dancing groups, bands will play,” said Debbie Varela, parade chairman.

12th Annual Fiesta

It will be Corona’s 12th annual Cinco de Mayo parade and fiesta, featuring games and traditional Mexican and American foods--from enchiladas to corn on the cob--at City Park.

On Sunday, more food and music is on the agenda at the Civic Center lawn, where about 100 people, mostly members of the city’s pioneer families and their friends, will gather to mark Founders’ Day, the 100th anniversary of a land purchase that put Corona--then called South Riverside--on the map.

“This is actually the birthday of Corona,” said Dee Lingenfelter, city clerk and chairman of the Corona Centennial Commission.

Bands from the city’s three junior high schools, and another from neighboring Norco, will perform at 1 p.m., followed by patriotic ceremonies and talks by some of the community’s most senior residents.

One of them, 90-year-old Dr. Carol Jameson, retired to her father’s original adobe in central Corona after practicing medicine at the Mayo Clinic and doing missionary work in India, Lingenfelter said. When Jameson came to Corona the fist time, she was just 3 months old.

Choral Performance

Also scheduled Sunday are a choral performance and the ground breaking for a centennial monument at the Civic Center, which will hold time capsules. (Corona has had trouble with time capsules, failing last year to find as many as 17 that were thought to be buried beneath the City Hall steps.)

Corona’s history began in 1846, when Mexican Governor Pio Pico granted 17,787 acres in Rancho La Sierra to Bernardo Yorba, just weeks before the United States took control of California, Lingenfelter said.

Forty years later, five investors put up $200,000 to form the South Riverside Land and Water Company. On May 4, 1886, they bought 12,000 acres from Yorba’s heirs. The deal closed six days later.

The five founders’ names are preserved on the street corners of the city they laid out; streets have been named for each of them: Robert Taylor, Adolph Rimpau, George L. Joy, A. S. Garretson and Samuel Merrill, a former governor of Iowa.

The company sold some of its land for $100 an acre, with improvements, records show. In one particularly good day, it sold $50,000 worth.

Lemon Capital

“They were speculating on the land,” Lingenfelter said. “Originally they wanted to plant grapes, but the grapes didn’t do too well, so they went to citrus production. . . . The soil was good for that.” Corona would later become known as the lemon capital of the world.

But there was, in earlier days, quite some debate over what to call the new village. Early residents seeking “an amicable settlement of the name controversy” circulated petitions, and an 1896 ballot offered four alternatives.

“Corona” won the day, with 120 votes, followed by “Circle City” with 13, “Superior” with 4, and “Montella” with 3. Three write-ins--”San Petersburg,” “South Leeds” and “McKinley”--each received a single vote, early city records show.

That same year, on July 13, Corona was incorporated as a city.