County’s Lost Towns : Some Former Farming Hamlets Are Little More Than Memories

It prospered mightily during the roaring ‘80s. Then when the economy went bust with the coming of the ‘90s, jobs and people left in droves. Finally, an earthquake knocked it off the map.

A doomsayer’s prediction of Southern California’s future?

No, that is the true tale of Fairview, a once-was Orange County town born more than a century ago. Today, Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa sits on the land, and Fairview’s only known remnant is the street that bears it name.

Other examples of Orange County’s lost towns are completely gone, existing as little more than memories for a few old-timers.

Some of these once-were places died from souring economic fortunes; others got gobbled up by their bigger, richer neighbors. Few of Orange County’s tiny agrarian hamlets survived the wall-to-wall suburban sprawl that blanketed the county in the 1960s.

Fairview was just one of more than 100 towns in Los Angeles and Orange counties born during the land boom of the 1880s, when the railroads lured thousands of people to the area with promises of “health and wealth.”

Its developers and new settlers sought to transform the sleepy area, dominated by the old Spanish and Mexican ranchos, into an idyllic land of small farms connected by major roadways and serviced by a series of “crossroads” villages, which had schools, stores and post offices.

Fairview’s claim to fame was its “therapeutic” hot springs.

Boosters dreamed of turning the farming community into a premier health resort and even moved the town’s hotel and general store closer to the springs’ bathhouses to attract visitors, according to historian Pamela Hallan-Gibson, La Palma city manager and author of “The Golden Promise.”

The town was described in advertisements as “Quiet, Cheerful, Homelike.” But the collapse of the Southern California real estate boom in 1889 stymied growth.

A few years later, developer W.S. Collins invested thousands of dollars in publicizing Fairview as a resort but failed to generate much business. A 1918 earthquake cut off the spring’s flow of water to the surface, writing Fairview’s final chapter.

Relics from lost towns like Fairview are rare. But if you look hard enough, you might spot a few.

With its white wooden exterior, modest tower and distinctive woodwork, the All Saints Church on the corner of Talbert Avenue and Bushard Street in Fountain Valley is one of the last remaining markers of the old community of Talbert.

The town was founded by the Talbert family and at its height included a general store, school, billiard hall, ice cream shop and barber, said Fountain Valley historical buff Jim Dick.

Talbert also was home to a Japanese market that catered to the area’s many Japanese-American farmers, said Julien Lecrivain, a Huntington Beach man who grew up in the area. “Everybody knew each other over there.”

A few miles to the west at the corner of Warner Avenue and Gothard Street, another turn-of-the-century church stands as one of the last remnants of Wintersburg.

The town was “fairly prominent” during the first half of the century and served as the home to Alpha Beta markets’ feedlot and meat packing plant through the 1930s, said historian Don Dobmeier, of the Orange County Historical Commission.

Wintersburg was large enough to warrant its own telephone exchange and special section in the Huntington Beach newspaper, added Jerry Person, member of Huntington Beach’s historical resources board.

In addition to the church, a scattering of older homes have survived including a two-story craftsman house with ornate woodwork and pillars along Gothard Street.

A less familiar place is Smeltzer, located where today a chain of shopping centers lines Edinger Avenue near Beach Boulevard. The community was founded by the Smeltzer Co. in the late 19th Century and existed for years as a company town where the workers packed celery, Dobmeier said.

A drive down today’s Warner Avenue near Main Street in Santa Ana offers a view of what once was Delhi (pronounced del-high), another old farming community. The town was formed by the McFadden brothers, who named the crossroads after their onetime home of Delhi, N.Y. At its zenith, Delhi boasted of several sugar factories and a school, according to Don Meadows’ book “Historic Place Names in Orange County.”

Delhi “was mainly Hispanic and was considered a poor community,” remembered Max Becker, a Santa Ana man who has lived in Orange County since 1939. Many residents “worked on the farms and made low wages.”

As small as Smeltzer and Delhi were, at least they lasted into the 20th Century--a fate not shared by more than half of the 1880s boom towns.

For the 1880s boom towns that survived into the early 20th Century, it was a quiet existence. They offered services to the farmers whose vast lands separated the hamlets from the county’s larger cities like Santa Ana, Anaheim and Fullerton.

But with the development boom of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, most crossroads towns lacked the population or prosperity to survive. It is hard to understate how profoundly the post-World War II development boom changed the landscape, historians said.

“Little parts of town lost their identity,” Dobmeier said. “West Orange or West Anaheim used to be considered almost out of town by a mile. Now, they are practically in downtown. Now, a mile means nothing.”

Talbert was taken over by Fountain Valley. Smeltzer and Wintersburg were annexed by Huntington Beach and soon became unfamiliar names to the area’s swelling population.

Many towns’ fortunes also plummeted with post-World War II road improvements, which made it easier for residents to travel to the larger cities where the markets were more plentiful and better stocked.

“The roads got better and there wasn’t any excuse for going to these stores” in Talbert, Lecrivain remembered. “It got more convenient to go into Santa Ana.”

The town of Bolsa shared a similar fate. Located around today’s intersection of Bolsa Avenue and Brookhurst Street, Bolsa was born around the same time as neighboring Garden Grove, at the corner of today’s Main Street and Garden Grove Boulevard.

“Bolsa just didn’t go anywhere,” said Dobmeier, who remembers visiting the town in the early 1950s. “There just wasn’t much there.”

As Bolsa remained stagnant, Garden Grove flourished because it was closer to the railroad. When rapid development began, Bolsa was soon swallowed up by nearby Westminster. Like Fairview, one of the few markers that Bolsa ever existed is the street that bears its name.

Larger cities like Santa Ana and Garden Grove, hungry to replace orchards with housing tracts, competed furiously for land. Sometimes the annexations went smoothly, other times things were more acrimonious.

In 1957, Westminster planned to merge with Midway City and Barber City (near the intersection of Rancho Road and Westminster Avenue) to form Tri-City.

But after much debate, Midway City pulled out of the union, preferring instead to remain its own unincorporated community. Barber City and Westminster did incorporate, and twice during the last 30 years unsuccessfully sought to annex Midway City.

Today, Midway City remains a distinct unincorporated area of modest tract homes homes and businesses surrounded by Westminster. As for Barber City to the west, “it lost its identification. I don’t know if a lot of the people who live there now even know it once was its own town,” Dobmeier said.

Midway City is not the only community to survive the development boom with some of its identity still intact.

At the corner of what is today Coast Highway and Doheny Park Road sits Capistrano Beach, another 1880s boom town formed along the railroad line. Originally known as Capistrano by the Sea, it went bust with the economy in the 1890s.

After three name changes, the crossroads was christened Capistrano Beach in the 1940s. Thanks to such landmarks as its post office and the well-known Serra School, Capistrano Beach remained a notable junction along the Coast Highway, Gibson said.

And even when most of its historic buildings disappeared, the town remained an independent unincorporated community for several decades. Many locals still consider their home Capistrano Beach even though the area was incorporated as a part of Dana Point on Jan. 1, 1989.

Another distinct community that survives within a larger city is historic Olive, which was known for years as the Gateway City of Orange County because the main road from Riverside ran through it.

Situated in northern Orange, the town was formed around Lincoln Avenue at Orange Olive Road, named at a time when vast orange and olive groves divided Olive and Orange. Once called Old Santa Ana, it is the second-oldest community in the county behind San Juan Capistrano.

The area is dotted with century-old wooden structures, and at the corner of Lincoln and Orange Olive is the decaying hulk of a packinghouse with “Orange Sunkist Orange” written in giant but faded block letters. A grand old church is nearby.

For much of the early 20th Century, the town thrived with its orange packing plant, bank and church. Olive’s well-known drugstore, where the owner displayed his impressive gun collection, “was a place to hang out for a lot of old-timers,” said lifelong Orange County resident Duncan Clark, 80.

A fire that burned down the beloved drugstore coupled with encroaching housing tracts has dulled some of Olive’s distinctiveness.

Then there is the story of Dairyland, between Buena Park and the Los Angeles County line.

Facing rapid growth on all sides, dairy farmers in 1955 incorporated in an attempt to prevent their fields from being overrun by development.

It was a losing battle. The farms succumbed one after the other, victims in part to tax laws that encouraged building, Gibson said.

As new residents moved into the town in the 1960s, the remaining dairy farms became more a source of contention than contentment. One City Council candidate distributed fly swatters as a way of illustrating his views about the farms, Gibson added.

Residents eventually erased the city’s agrarian heritage from its name altogether. In 1965, Dairyland became La Palma.

It was the end of an epoch. By then, most of Orange County’s other farming towns were dying or dead. Fresh freeways and housing tracts were replacing the orange groves from Seal Beach to Yorba Linda and south to San Clemente. And on the land where Fairview once stood, students from many of those new homes were going to college.

Vanishing Towns

Orange County was once alive with small farming hamlets, but most have disappeared with the advent of urban sprawl. 1. Dairyland 2. Barber City 3. Midway City 4. Smeltzer 5. Winterburg 6. Bolsa 7. Talbert 8. Fairview 9. Olive 10. West Anaheim 11. Capistrano Beach