I’ve come to think of 1913 as a a high water mark, an icy high water mark, in the early history of the city of Redlands.  The freeze of 1913 threw the local economy, based around citrus, into a tailspin; the town froze in more ways than one.   One by-product of this is that the beautiful domestic architecture of the city was frozen in time; the growth that you would have expected from a pre-1913 linear progression never happened.  In this analysis, the city developed up until 1913 and then semi-literally, froze.  The houses we have today are the fruits of the freeze of 1913.

It’s hard to imagine now, since Redlands is a sleepy petit-bourgeois backwater, but before 1913 it was one of the wealthiest towns in southern California.  Redlands, like other towns in the citrus belt of inland Southern California,  started as a colony, a planned community of relatively wealthy settlers.  The equation was: land + water + citrus + transport.  (I’ve written about this colony mechanism before; before 1885 you already had the model colonies of Etiwanda and Ontario, the Riverside pioneer colony, the German colony in Anaheim, and, in 1876, the LDS agricultural colony of San Bernardino.)  These colonies served as magnets for additional settlement.  This settlement pattern meant that the town was first rich and subsequently only got poorer.

A popular anecdote illustrates the point: the Redlands Country Club, one of the oldest in the country, was founded in 1896 and at the charter meeting of the Southern California Golf Association three years later, Redlands was there along with four other clubs: the Los Angeles Country Club, Pasadena Golf Club, Riverside Polo and Golf Club and Santa Monica Country Club.

The Lugonia Colony (named for the Gallego-Mexican Lugo family who owned the land before them) in the 1870s was followed by the Redlands Colony in 1881.  Crucial to its success was the establishment of the Redlands Water Company in the same year, which in turn developed Big Bear dam (1883-1885).   The arid land was of little agricultural value without the water from the mountains.  The introduction of the navel orange (a cloned mutant), which thrived in the narrow belt along the mountains, was the perfect crop to exploit those conditions.  The arrival of the transcontinental railroad opened up markets for the crop and the colony, and the city after it, boomed.

Much of the built environment of that early era, though, remain. The quality of the turn-of-the-century architecture, across the board, is very high; everything from humble bungalows to grand mansions to the civic buildings.