Going to 1930s Riverside? Head Out Past Tubbs’

This bucolic country road was way west of Tustin when the photo at top right was taken, around 1930.

The land on the right behind the hedgerow of eucalyptus trees is the Tubbs’ citrus ranch. Volney Victor Tubbs went east 40 years earlier to get a wife, and they raised a son and two daughters on the ranch.

If you wanted to go to Riverside, you got on this lonely road, and it eventually took you through Santa Ana Canyon. It was the road less traveled, however. More people were bound for Los Angeles and took El Camino Real at 1st Street.

Columbus Tustin, founder of his namesake city, had no flair for naming streets. He christened the north-south streets after letters, east-west streets after numbers. But his successors named this country pathway Tustin Avenue, as if expecting greater things than a dirt road.

It would be hard to find a patch of dirt there nowadays. The photo at bottom right shows the same stretch of road--looking north along Tustin Avenue from 4th Street in Santa Ana.

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