New varieties
Southern Californians also began to experiment with citrus, creating their own unique varieties. While the Lisbon lemon, a variety originally from Portugal, continued to grow in abundance, it was soon matched in popularity by the Eureka lemon, a thornless, everbearing and hearty variant propagated by Los Angeles nurseryman Thomas Garey in 1877.
So profitable was the citrus industry, according to Jenkins, that its produce was one of the main reasons that the major rail companies began to extend their lines to Los Angeles in the late 1800s.
And when they did, they chose to build their terminals and rail yards directly around the Wolfskill and Vignes’ properties, a logistics’ gold mine in terms of exporting citrus across the country. Soon, the area was swallowed up by the railroads, and citrus moved into open land elsewhere.
“California didn't invent the citrus industry in the United States,” Jenkins says. “But it definitely dominated by the time the railroads came in about the 1880s and 1890s.”
Boosters in Southern California saw the orange and lemon as powerful PR tools to entice sickly, wealthy Midwesterners and Eastern settlers in search of health and rejuvenation. Sanitariums, where you could recover from tuberculosis and other ailments in the sunshine and clear California air, began to open, and many of the patients, once healed, never left the state.
“If you were to look at newspaper accounts from Victorian California, from the Gilded Age advertisements, and correspondence people are sending back east, they’re absolutely thinking of California as a paradise, where in particular a lot of invalids come to try to heal themselves of consumption or tuberculosis or other lung problems,” Jenkins says.
“And part of the prescription that many of their doctors would tell them is that you spend some time in your sanitarium, but then you buy a little plot of land in California, you plant some oranges, and you get hopped up on vitamin C from maybe the lemonade that you're growing as well.”
The rise of Sunkist
In 1893, the Southern California Fruit Exchange, which is now known as Sunkist, was formed by a co-op of growers to help protect their assets and to lobby for California grown citrus. The powerful group (now based in Valencia) became a powerhouse in PR, placing advertising in paper and magazines across the country, promoting orange juice and lemonade as all-American staples.
“They promoted the idea that you should not only drink lemonade, but make sure that it's Sunkist made from lemons in California,” Jenkins says. “In The Saturday Evening Post or Ladies Home Journal they would have lavish illustrations showing a huge pitcher of lemonade with maybe a couple of lemons sitting next to it, touting the benefits of vitamin C and how it's like drinking a little bit of California sunshine.”