CELEBRATE! : ORANGE COUNTY’S FIRST...

Citrus grower Jean Lecouage walked along a row of orange trees, talking of his plans for spring. There was new irrigation pipe to install. And, as usual, he was battling an infestation of snails that were chewing small, white holes in his healthy Valencia oranges. But this will be a quieter growing season for Lecouage. Last year, the San Juan Capistrano rancher gave up a 67-year family tradition and sold 255 acres of groves to a developer.

“For aesthetics,” he said, he kept five acres at the end of San Juan Creek Road. Located on a hill, these last 250 orange trees surround two mobile homes and a large stucco house where he and his children still live.

Below the hill, Dividend Development Corp. of Santa Clara has ripped out the trees that Lecouage’s father first planted in 1920. In their stead wooden stakes with pink flags sprout from the dark clay, marking sites where 230 homes will be built. As a bulldozer moved back and forth across the dirt one recent sunny morning, Lecouage watched quietly but said he had no regrets about selling.

“A farm is a business, by golly,” he said. “When it’s served its purpose, out come the trees. It’s really like selling a hardware store or a shoe store.”

The story is a familiar one in Orange County. Land that grew citrus now grows homes. Lecouage is simply one of the latest growers to sell.

Harold E. Wahlberg, Orange County’s farm adviser for 35 years, once described the county as “one big orange grove.” The groves stretched from Yorba Linda to San Juan Capistrano in row upon row of trees, the juicy fruit of which was the county’s principal crop for nearly 100 years.

Although Orange County’s first orange trees were planted in the 1700s by Franciscan friars, the cultivation of oranges as an industry did not catch on until the latter 1800s. In fact, as late as 1875, visiting historian Theodore Van Dyke criticized the local product, calling it “pithy, sour, thick-skinned and dry . . . an insult to the noblest of fruit.”

It was in 1870 that Anaheim doctor William N. Hardin bought two barrels of rotten Tahitian oranges and planted their seeds. Three years later, Patterson Bowers planted a small stand of seedless Australian navel oranges along Santiago Creek near Orange.

At the time, oranges were viewed mainly as curiosities. For instance, real estate developer Capt. W. T. Glassell in 1872 used them as a sales gimmick, placing two orange seedlings in front of his office in Richland, which later became the city of Orange.

In 1875, county ranchers made a serious effort to grow oranges when Richard Hall Gilman, an advance man for the newly formed Southern California Semi-Tropical Fruit Co., bought 110 acres of land in Placentia. He planted some of the land in walnuts, but devoted 40 acres to Valencia seedlings, creating the county’s first orange grove. Not long after Gilman established his grove, Fullerton resident Sheldon Littlefield planted another stand of Valencias east of Fullerton.

During the next decade, the orange industry took hold, spurred by the arrival of the Santa Fe Railroad, which by 1887 serviced the length of Orange County and made markets in Chicago, Des Moines and New York available to county growers.

The grape blight of 1886 provided another incentive when a virus called “the Anaheim disease” wiped out 5 million grapevines, encouraging ranchers to switch to a more promising crop--citrus.

In 1894, Littlefield’s grove was acquired by Charles C. Chapman, a former hotel builder from Chicago who became Fullerton’s first mayor. An aggressive promoter of his own Old Mission Brand oranges, Chapman garnered fame as “the father of the Valencia industry.”

“I believed that I could see a tremendous future, particularly for the development of the orange,” he wrote. “And I threw my whole energy into the culture of this glorious fruit.”

In 1921, when the county’s first Valencia Orange Show opened in Anaheim, Chapman kicked it off with a bevy of Hollywood actresses (Gloria Swanson among them) and a telephone greeting from President Warren Harding.

At the county agriculture commissioner’s office in Anaheim, a logbook of faded entries charts the growth of the citrus industry. In 1923, some 37,528 acres of Valencias produced 4.3 million boxes of oranges worth $10.9 million. And by 1930, county growers had expanded their plantings to 44,449 acres that produced 5 million boxes of Valencias valued at $35.7 million.

These were good years, too, for Jean Lecouage’s father Pierre, a Basque immigrant from France who had bought his land in 1920 for $50 an acre. “My father paid for the land out of the profits of his oranges,” Lecouage said. “In the middle of the Depression, he paid it off.”

As the groves expanded, so did a new business designed to serve them--packing houses. The first, the Fay Fruit Co., was established in Orange in 1881. By 1913, there were 16 packing houses. And by 1929, the Santiago Growers’ Assn. in Orange boasted that it had shipped more oranges that year than any other packing house in the world--2,000 carloads.

To market their crops, local growers in 1893 formed a co-op, the Southern California Fruit Exchange, which located one of its first packing houses in Fullerton. That group reorganized in 1905 to become the California Fruit Growers’ Exchange. In 1952, it became part of Sunkist, the large marketing organization that now sells Southern California oranges as far away as the Orient.

Although the business could be profitable, there was nothing easy about growing oranges. Patterson Bowers’ early grove near Orange was infested with red scale, and the pest soon spread. By 1889, red scale had infected a third of the county’s groves. To fight it, growers at the turn of the century either chopped down their infected trees or tried to save them by spraying the trees with goo made from whale oil soap or a mixture of caustic soda and shark oil.

In 1921, and again in 1929, the mealybug invaded Anaheim, infecting more than 45,000 trees. Growers, however, found a natural pest that could fight it--the Australian ladybug. On Vermont Street in Anaheim, an “insectory” to raise and bottle the bugs was built. “They came 10 beetles to a capsule,” recalled a foreman from the Bradford Bros. groves in Placentia. “They were exceptionally effective little fellows.”

Growers also fought to keep their groves from freezing during cold snaps. When the mercury fell below 28 degrees, juicy oranges could turn dry and tasteless overnight. In 1913, the temperature dipped to 22 degrees three days in a row, and growers burned bean straw in the groves to try to save their trees.

In the 1920s and ‘30s, growers discovered a new method of warming their trees--smudge pots. Advertisements in the county Farm Bureau News promoted “smokeless orchard heaters” at $1.75 apiece. The heaters--three-foot-high metal, stove-like contraptions that burned diesel oil--were far from “smokeless,” however.

In a brief essay on “Smudging in the ‘30s,” Tustin writer Edgar E. Pankey recalled: “To the housewives, it meant black smoke seeping through the window cracks to blacken the curtains, walls and clothes.”

But to Tustin high school boys like Pankey, smudging meant a chance to earn extra money. On chilly nights, the Tustin fire station would blast a warning signal at 8 p.m., and boys would run to the groves with torches to light the smudge pots.

“It was a spectacular sight to see all those lighted smudge pots on a dark, clear night--thousands of them . . . a pot at every other tree in every other row,” Pankey wrote.

It was spectacularly expensive, too, costing thousands of dollars in diesel oil each frost to keep the pots burning. But the growers had little choice: “In one freeze, an entire year’s income could be lost,” Pankey wrote.

In letters to the county Farm Bureau News, growers complained again and again of “red ink” and the difficulty of placing their industry “on a money-making basis.” Still, they were in an expansion mode. By 1940, the county agriculture commissioner’s office recorded 62,584 acres planted in Valencias and 1,168 in navels. That year, the groves produced more than 9.3 million boxes of oranges valued at $16.9 million.

During World War II, when field workers left the groves for jobs in defense plants, growers supplemented their work force. In 1943, they brought in a contingent of Mexican nationals or braceros , and a year later, 1,600 Jamaicans were brought in to work in the fields.

The Jamaicans camped in tents outside Irvine and La Habra and, unaccustomed to war rations, staged a brief sit-down strike over the food. Also during the war years, growers were provided an unusual source of labor--500 German prisoners of war were brought to Garden Grove to pick a bumper crop.

The ‘40s were good years for citrus: In 1948, the county recorded its all-time high: 65,472 acres of Valencias kept 45 packing houses busy.

But then the groves declined. One cause was a new citrus disease: tristeza, meaning “sadness” in Spanish. Growers had another name for it: “quick decline.” The virus was first detected in Orange County orchards in 1943. “It stopped the flow of sap and nutrients from the root stock,” said Dean Millan, retired superintendent of the University of California’s research station in Irvine. “The tree would die with a full crop of oranges--all in one season.”

“It was almost like a cancer,” Lecouage said. “Sometimes you’d notice a tree was off-color, and you’d know it would die in a year. Other times, you could have a perfectly healthy tree, and it would be stone-cold dead in two weeks.”

Some growers pulled up their infected trees and replanted. Others sold out to developers. By 1950, oranges were still a big business--worth $20 million--but the county’s Valencia acreage had declined to 56,070 acres.

In 1955, when Walt Disney purchased 160 acres of Anaheim groves for an amusement park, the growers were eager to sell. “Walt Disney got a good deal on the land because those trees were dying of quick decline,” said UC farm adviser Gary Bender. Some of the growers bought new groves in Tulare, Ventura and San Bernardino counties, but many retired from the business.

In the ‘50s, housing tracts began replacing groves at a rapid pace. “The old-timers would send us out to look for a particular bug--and we’d discover there wasn’t a grove there anymore. There was a housing tract,” says Nick Sakovich, the last UC farm adviser to work full time in Orange County. He was transferred to Ventura in 1982.

Citrus growers had another problem in the ‘50s: City dwellers complained that smudge pots were causing smog. In 1950, the “Housewives Anti-Smudge Committee of Santa Ana” gathered 2,000 signatures on a petition to ban the use of oil heaters.

Tustin grower Ross Shafer countered that the groves were there first and that the newcomers had “settled in the citrus areas.” Therefore, he said, they had a “moral obligation” to live with the soot. But county supervisors did not agree. Later that year, they passed an ordinance restricting the use of the orchard heaters.

By 1986, citrus plantings had dwindled to a new low--only 80 acres of navels and 4,597 acres of Valencias remained. The fruit brought county growers $24.7 million that year, but oranges ranked third among the county’s crops, outpaced by both nursery stock and strawberries.

There were still enough growers to support three packing houses--Irvine Valencia in Irvine, Villa Park Orchards in Orange and the Yorba Linda Growers Assn. in Valencia. But oranges were no longer a lucrative crop, except for large growers like the Irvine Co. and Rancho Mission Viejo.

“It can be a nice, profitable hobby” for those with small groves in their back yards, says John Ellis, deputy agriculture commissioner. But for some growers, the cost of picking their groves is greater than the price their oranges get at the packing house.

That is something Lecouage understands only too well. Although his groves last year produced one of the biggest crops in years, he earned only 50 cents a box--barely enough to cover the costs of fumigating the soil, irrigating the trees and picking the oranges. So he decided that “to continue here was futile.”

Not only was citrus not profitable, but new housing tracts along San Juan Creek Road also presented new problems.

“Farming and residential people are incompatible,” Lecouage says bitterly. “They complain about the dirt and the noise--everything except the blossoms in the spring. They ride horses in the groves and ride over the darn sprinkler pipes . . . And they complain about the irrigation--the runoff in their yards, saying, ‘Why can’t you do something about it?’ Hell, it’s always been there. We were farming first.”

For five years, Lecouage turned down the real estate people who came to his door. But last year he gave in. Although three generations of his family had worked this land, he had to sell, Lecouage says. “You can’t eat the land. I can’t make money growing oranges.”