A Colony for California (SIGNED)

PATTERSON, Tom.

A Colony for California. Riverside's First Hundred Years.

SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR. Riverside: Press-Enterprise Company, 1971.

Signed by Tom Patterson on the front free endpaper. 8vo. 511 pp., with index and a bound-in leaf of noted errors at the rear. Photographic illustrations; maps by Janet Bailey; foreword by John G. Gabbert of the Fourth California Appellate District. Salmon cloth; in the pictorial dust jacket reproducing North's 1870 prospectus in orange with an oval portrait of the founder. Printed in Riverside by the Rubidoux Printing Co. Foxing to the endpapers and page edges; light wear to the jacket.

A history of Riverside's first hundred years, from the colony John Wesley North founded in 1870 to the city of 1970. North was an abolitionist who had already built Northfield, Minnesota, and served Lincoln as surveyor general of Nevada Territory; he advertised in the East for families of good character to buy in with him on the dry Southern California plain. What followed was citrus: the two Washington navel orange trees the USDA sent Eliza Tibbets in 1873 took root here, and by 1900 the navel was the most extensively grown crop in the state, throwing off the packing houses, refrigerated freight cars and satellite towns Patterson tracks alongside the water suits, the Mission Inn, segregation in the schools and the rocket-guidance work that came later. Patterson reported for the Press-Enterprise from 1946 and had been studying the city's history for twenty-five years when he wrote it; reviewing the book in 1973, Edwin T. Coman Jr. called it “an excellent example of what a local history should be.”

SKU TO-2026-149