CELEBRATE! : ORANGE COUNTY’S FIRST 100 YEARS : THE GROWTH YEARS : Boom Times in a ‘Garden of Eden’ : The frantic land rush was on: ‘Every purchaser will double his money inside 60 days.’

The mustard grass was so tall in places, the story goes, that even on horseback Uncle Billy Spurgeon couldn’t see over it on a fall day in 1869. He had to dismount and climb a sycamore to get a better look at the land he had just bought. And from that vantage point, the waves of mustard grass “appeared like a sea, with here and there sycamore trees rising above it.”

Twenty years later, at the age of 60, Spurgeon would be too old and too dignified to climb a tree. Besides, most of the grass would be gone, the land now covered by houses, stores, hotels and banks built during the 1880s real estate boom that put the town Spurgeon called Santa Ana--as well as its rivals: Anaheim, Tustin and Orange--on the map and fueled the movement toward the formation of Orange County.

Santa Ana, the city that was to become the county seat, didn’t look like much early in 1886, the year the boom began. Much of downtown Fourth Street--not far from Spurgeon’s sycamore tree--was lined with ramshackle buildings, and even the boostering Santa Ana Herald admitted that the town looked a little “down at heels.”

Santa Ana had much the same problem as the rest of the state: There was plenty of land but not enough people.

Anyone who would benefit from an influx of immigrants from the East--real estate agents, merchants, railroad operators, landowners--pumped up the overheated advertising rhetoric of the day in newspaper ads such as this one for one of Spurgeon’s tracts: “Hip! Hip! Hurrah! A Garden of Eden for a Home. Every purchaser will double his money inside 60 days.”

For a time, the railroads--in heated competition for tourist and immigrant traffic--lowered fares from the Mississippi River to California from $125 to $5. The railroads also owned a lot of land, much of it given to them by developers in return for routing a rail line through their towns.

One of the key promoters of the area was a shrewd former postmaster from Massachusetts named George H. Fullerton, who led to California the Santa Fe Railroad’s first trainload of tourists from back East. The railroad gave him the considerable sum of $50,000 to beguile Easterners with promises of easy fortunes.

On that first trip, a detachment of soldiers got off in Arizona to fight Apaches. Fullerton’s tourists were so nervous during the rest of the ride through the territory that one man rode on the floor with his pistol in his lap.

Fullerton became president of the Pacific Land Improvement Co., a development subsidiary of the Santa Fe Railroad that laid out towns all over what is now Orange County. The railroad sold hundreds of lots in such towns as St. James, which was just south of Olive, and San Juan By-the-Sea, which was perched on cliffs above Capistrano Beach. But many of these “towns” were but names on a map, and they are now long forgotten.

The railroads weren’t the only promoters of these “paper towns.” Among the noisiest were the owners of a town called Fairview, and much of the noise was probably the sound of desperation. They built a hotel and other commercial buildings on 1,800 acres for which they had paid $300,000. But it all came to naught; the town of Fairview never got off the ground. The land is now the site of Orange Coast College and the Mesa Verde Country Club in Costa Mesa.

But there were successes. As the Santa Fe Railroad pushed into the area, it was originally supposed to stop in Buena Park, but much of the town was inundated by an 1887 flood. When George Fullerton was offered land in a new town north of Buena Park as an incentive to extend the railroad line to that point, he accepted on behalf of the railroad.

On such decisions did the fate of these new towns rest. Stunted by the lack of a railroad, Buena Park didn’t incorporate until 1953, while the town that got the railroad was big enough to incorporate in 1904.

The town was Fullerton, although it was almost named Marceline after the wife of the railroad’s superintendent.

George Fullerton either left or was forced out of his job shortly afterward--the circumstances are unclear--and probably never lived in the town that bears his name.

Another investor in Fullerton was H. Gaylord Wilshire, who was just warming up his skills as a huckster. After buying the railroad’s share of Fullerton land, Wilshire owned three-quarters of the town’s first 400 acres, while his partners, brothers Edward and George Amerige, owned the remaining quarter. Wilshire’s greatest real estate coup, however, would be in Los Angeles, where he would develop a sizable chunk of what is now Wilshire Boulevard.

Only three of the new towns of the ‘80s boom survived: Fullerton, Buena Park and El Toro. It was in the older, established towns that the boom had its greatest effect: Tustin, Orange, Anaheim and, of course, Santa Ana.

The impact was reflected in the growth of Santa Ana’s population from 2,000 residents in 1886, the year the boom started, to 3,600--nearly double--within four years.

A description in the Santa Ana Herald may sound familiar to today’s home buyers, who occasionally must camp out at new subdivisions to be first in line for a home: “In all directions dwelling houses are going up, and yet the demand for them cannot be supplied. They are rented in some instances before they are commenced.”

Everyone got into real estate. By 1888--with the boom two years old and the end seemingly nowhere in sight--a joke was making the rounds about the minister who told his congregation that the text for his sermon was drawn from the “St. John subdivision, Block 3, Lot 16.”

Booming, too, were Spurgeon’s businesses. It was said that he hadn’t made much on the sale of his original land, the 24 blocks of downtown Santa Ana; he sold lots for only $15 apiece and sometimes had to offer buyers another lot free to get the town under way.

But a store he started had prospered, and he owned land downtown and more land nearby. Spurgeon also owned a piece of the biggest bank in town, as well as part of the gas company, the water company and a small railroad. He became the town’s first mayor in 1886.

It was clear that what was good for Santa Ana was good for Spurgeon, and vice versa. And Santa Ana, during those few years of the boom, was doing very well indeed.

For instance: On Dec. 7, 1886, according to the Herald, an excursion train from Los Angeles dumped 275 people at a lot sale in Santa Ana. Within two hours, they had bought all 71 lots for a total of $20,000.

Spurgeon and other big landowners watched in amazement at first but eventually grew accustomed to the insatiable demand for land. Even land that was miles from the nearest house or railroad sold for astonishing prices.

Even some small landowners were making a killing: By 1887, the Herald was reporting the case of a Mr. Swainer, who bought a house and lot on Fourth Street for $1,400 and sold it for $4,500 a short time later.

But there was a problem: Anaheim, which was founded as a vineyard town in 1857 by a colony of German immigrants. By 1880, Santa Ana had twice as many people as Anaheim. Yet the nearby town continued to petition the state legislature for a separate county--with Anaheim as the county seat.

That worried Santa Ana and business leaders like Spurgeon. And now--in 1888--the great boom was starting to slacken after only two years of frenetic construction.

Those buyers who were last in the game of musical chairs--the ones who had paid the highest prices for their land and were stuck with it as its value plummeted--lost their shirts.

The bust “left the fair face of Southern California strewn with the pitiful wrecks of erstwhile handsome fortunes,” lamented a 1911 pamphlet about Spurgeon.

So Spurgeon, a former legislator and a Democrat, and James McFadden, another developer and a Republican, took the train to Sacramento to try to persuade the legislature to protect their investment by creating a new county.

It was a good thing for Santa Ana that Spurgeon succeeded because Orange County wouldn’t see anything like the boom of the 1880s for a long time. Growth slowed to a crawl during the 1890s and didn’t pick up again until the 1920s, when the entire U.S. economy got a lift after World War I. Then the economy wheezed to a halt again during the Depression.

Meanwhile, Spurgeon--who also became the first chairman of the county Board of Supervisors--had died in 1915 at the age of 86. A photograph shows him sitting stiffly in the upholstered seat of an open auto, his spiky beard spilling down his chest, while his wife sits beside him staring stonily at the camera. Spurgeon had grown into a sense of dignity and respectability befitting “the father of Santa Ana.”

Despite its short life, the 1880s boom left an indelible mark on downtown Santa Ana. Many of the buildings from the era--spruced up for their second century--are still there.

The likes of the great boom wouldn’t be seen again in Orange County until the 1950s, when the biggest boom of all started, one that--despite the fits and starts of several recessions--Orange County still finds itself in the midst of.

At the site of Spurgeon’s sycamore tree, there is now a small Woolworth’s parking lot. The tree is long gone. Another tree, planted by local history buffs, crouches to one side of the parking lot. A plaque on a concrete marker next to the tree proclaims this as Orange County Historical Site No. 12, “Santa Ana’s Birthplace.”

Spurgeon probably would have liked the memorial. It fits with his charming story about climbing the sycamore on that first day, and it doesn’t take up too much valuable commercial space.