CELEBRATE! : ORANGE COUNTY’S FIRST 100 YEARS : CREATING A COUNTY : YEAR BY YEAR : An accounting of what took place and when.

1889

Orange County separates from Los Angeles. Official business begins Aug. 1.

Modesta Avila becomes the first felon convicted in the county. Avila, unable to convince Santa Fe Railroad officials that the railroad is trespassing on her property, stretches a clothesline across the track just outside of San Juan Capistrano and hangs her wet laundry. The stationmaster is alerted and the laundry taken down before the train arrives, but Avila is arrested and tried on charges of obstructing the railroad. Sentenced to three years in prison, she dies two years later at San Quentin.

1890

First Orange County Fair is held.

1891

County’s first high school opens in Santa Ana.

1893

The Southern California Fruit Exchange, which will become Sunkist in 1952, is founded in Fullerton to assist farmers in spraying, picking, packaging and marketing their crops.

1896

County jail is completed in courthouse plaza in Santa Ana at a cost of $23,000.

1898

Santa Ana’s Company L of the California National Guard is activated for the Spanish-American War.

1899

John Norton establishes the county’s first golf links--a six-hole course in Laguna Beach--and forms the Laguna Club. Later in the year, James Irvine II forms the Sunset Golf Links, which will become Santiago Golf Club. A nine-hole course with “greens” of oil-soaked sand and fairways of native soil opens in Peters Canyon, near present-day Cowan Heights, on July 1, 1900.

1900

County Courthouse opens in Santa Ana, and at its dedication, balloonist Emil Markeburg plunges to his death before 8,000 spectators.

1901

Santa Ana Tin Mine in Trabuco Canyon opens.

1903

Saloons abolished in Santa Ana.

Contractor George Washington Smith’s crew, while laying pipe near Old County Park Road (about where Orange Park Acres is today) finds a small metallic box containing $5,020 in $20 gold coins--none dated later than 1856. Heirs of Santa Ana saloon owner Edwin Bessonette, who had died in 1895, unsuccessfully try to claim the money.

1904

Henry Huntington’s red cars reach Huntington Beach. Envisioning a clean, electric transportation system linking four Southern California counties, Huntington had started the interurban Pacific Electric Railway in Los Angeles to carry passengers and freight to more cities at a lower cost than traditional railroads. Service eventually reaches Newport Beach, Santa Ana, Balboa and Garden Grove.

1906

Santa Ana’s Company L is sent to San Francisco to help provide earthquake disaster relief.

Santa Ana’s Chinatown, an area of redwood shanties at Third and Bush streets, is burned by the city after officials reportedly find a man dying of leprosy and declare the area a health menace.

Balboa Pavilion opens.

Balboa Ferry begins operation.

Newport annexes Balboa.

1908

Cleveland National Forest is created by joining the San Jacinto and Trabuco Canyon reserves.

1909

Glenn Martin builds the first biplane in Orange County in an abandoned Santa Ana church and tests it in an Irvine Ranch pasture just south of Santa Ana.

1910

James Irvine II organizes the Santa Ana Cooperative Sugar Co. to process crops. The factory will be acquired by Holly Sugar in 1918.

The county’s largest single crop of tobacco is produced--40,000 pounds of Turkish tobacco raised by the Pacific States Tobacco Co.

1911

Women in Orange County get their first opportunity to vote. The chief ballot measure is on local option. In Tustin, 199 out of 400 votes are cast by women, and the town goes dry. In San Juan Capistrano, one woman is registered to vote, and the town stays wet.

1912

Aviator Glenn Martin crosses 34 miles from Newport Bay to Catalina Island in 37 minutes and sets a record for the longest flight over water.

1913

Fullerton Junior College opens. (It is now the oldest continuously operating junior college in the state.)

Richard Nixon is born in Yorba Linda.

1916

Santa Ana’s Company L is sent to New Mexico to pursue Pancho Villa.

The county’s worst flood to date maroons local communities and inundates west county lowlands.

1917

Santiago Coal Mine, the last coal mine in the county, closes.

1918

The largest bean field in the world--17,000 acres--is cultivated on Irvine Ranch.

Politician and orator William Jennings Bryan visits the county to sell “Baby Bonds” valued at $100 or less.

1921

Silent-film star Bebe Daniels is caught driving 56.5 m.p.h. through Santa Ana and jailed 10 days for speeding.

1922

Duke Kahanamoku, an Olympic champion swimmer from Honolulu, visits Corona del Mar and introduces surfing to the county. Four years later, Delbert (Bud) Higgins (later a Huntington Beach fire chief) makes the first surfboard in the county out of a pine plank. The board is 10 feet long, 4 inches thick, 26 inches wide and weighs 136 pounds.

The Ku Klux Klan gains a foothold in Anaheim, which for a time is touted as the model Klan city. The city sheds the image after a series of Klan setbacks, culminating with the citywide distribution of a secret membership list in 1925. Not only does the list reveal that the chapter has only 300 local members rather than the 1,400 claimed, but also that among the membership are four City Council members and 10 members of the Police Department.

1923

Eddie Martin Airport opens on leased Irvine Ranch property just north of today’s John Wayne Airport. Eddie Martin, who began making local aviation history in the 1920s, was no relation to pioneer aviator Glenn Martin.

County walnut production reaches its zenith with 17.7 million pounds of nuts, accounting for one-third of the world’s crop. The last 300-acre grove will be bulldozed on Irvine Ranch in 1966.

1924

A typhoid epidemic--started after heavy, nearly month-long rains in Santa Ana cause a sewer to pollute the water supply--kills 28.

Tuberculosis health camp opens in Trabuco Canyon.

Babe Ruth and pitcher Walter Johnson play in exhibition baseball game at Brea Bowl, northeast of Fullerton. Johnson grew up in the Brea-Olinda area.

1925

An assailant hiding on the baggage-car roof of a Santa Fe train on an Oceanside/Santa Ana run shoots and kills an attendant, takes $2,500 and leaps off the fast-moving train. Neither robber nor money is recovered.

February flood prompts formation of the Orange County Flood Control District.

1926

Silent film star Mary Pickford joins local officials in a ceremony opening Pacific Coast Highway from Huntington Beach to Newport Beach.

1927

Walter Knott begins farming berries in Buena Park.

Ross Fields sets the all-time college milk-drinking record at Santa Ana Junior College--nine quarts in one sitting.

1928

First TransPacific Yacht Race to Hawaii leaves Newport Bay.

1929

Santiago Orange Growers Assn. in Orange becomes the largest citrus house in the country with 2,000 carloads shipped.

1930

Ralph Smedley, a YMCA secretary, founds Toastmasters International in Santa Ana.

1931

Irvine Lake is created.

Doheny Beach State Park opens on Capistrano Beach property donated by Edward L. Doheny, who faced bribery charges during the Teapot Dome scandal. Oil producer Doheny, along with oilman Harry Sinclair, was accused in 1923 of bribing U.S. Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall to arrange the transfer to the oilmen of valuable government oil reserve leases in Elk Hills, Calif., and Teapot Dome, Wyo. Doheny was acquitted.

1932

Local artists exhibit their paintings in the first Laguna Beach Festival of Arts. The following year, Lolita Perrine presents a series of “living pictures,” the beginning of today’s Pageant of the Masters.

Walter Knott begins marketing boysenberries with plants from Rudolph Boysen’s garden. Boysen had crossed blackberries and raspberries in Napa County about 10 years earlier, but had not commercially marketed the new berry.

1933

Earthquake centered 3 1/2 miles off Newport Beach kills 12 and causes $8 million in damage.

Howard Wilson, age 17, stumbles upon a skull fragment in Laguna Beach near what is now 255 St. Ann’s Drive. The skull, later named the “Laguna Woman,” proves to be 17,500 years old, making her one of the earliest humans known to have lived in the Americas.

1935

Howard Hughes sets a new speed record of 351 m.p.h. in his all-metal, low-wing monoplane at a National Aeronautical Assn. speed course located north of Costa Mesa and the Eddie Martin Airport. He runs out of gas after breaking the record and lands safely in a beet field.

1936

President Franklin D. Roosevelt presses a telegraph key on his desk in Washington, D.C., triggering a signal that announced the opening of the $4-million Newport Harbor.

The first “Flight of the Snowbirds,” a sailing event for young people manning one-person Snowbird boats, is sponsored by the Newport Beach Chamber of Commerce. The event will be held each summer until 1969.

1938

President Roosevelt visits Laguna Beach. His motorcade draws nearly all city residents to the intersection of Park Avenue and Pacific Coast Highway.

A series of storms floods 68,400 acres, killing 45 and leaving 2,000 homeless.

1939

An eight-day heat wave hits, and the temperature reaches 119 degrees.

1941

Irvine Bowl site is donated to the city of Laguna Beach by the Irvine Company for the Festival of the Arts.

Orange County Airport opens.

1942

Orange County’s 1,800 Japanese-Americans are evacuated to Poston, Ariz., in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. Only 600 will choose to return after their release.

1943

El Toro Marine Base opens on 4,000 acres of Irvine Ranch.

Lighter-Than-Air Station, established to house blimps on coastal submarine patrol, is built on 1,600 acres of Irvine Company bean fields south of Tustin.

Citrus Growers Inc. is established to bring in 1,650 workers, called braceros , from Mexico to harvest crops during the war. One year later, 1,600 Jamaicans are brought to the county to join the emergency farm labor work force.

1945

German prisoners of war are assigned to orchard duty through a program run by the state Agricultural Extension Service. The prisoners pick more than a million boxes of fruit.

1946

In response to a petition filed by five men of Mexican descent against school officials in Westminster, Garden Grove, El Modena and Santa Ana, U.S. District Judge Paul J. McCormick rules that segregation violates the state and U.S. constitutions. McCormick gains national attention as the first federal court judge to denounce segregation in the public schools. The case ends school segregation in Orange County.

1947

After a sensationalized murder trial, lovers Bud Gollum and Beulah Overell are acquitted of charges of bludgeoning her parents to death and dynamiting the Overells’ Newport Harbor cabin cruiser with the bodies on board. At the time, the 19-week trial was the longest in county history.

1948

First Newport-Ensenada Yacht Race is held.

Greatest Valencia orange acreage--65,472 acres--recorded.

Orange Coast College opens on the former Santa Ana Army Air Base property. Two years later, the Southern California Bible College, the county’s first four-year college, also establishes a campus at the site.

1949

Joseph E. Prentice gives Santa Ana 12 acres of citrus groves on E. First Street to be designated as Prentice Park. As part of the deed, Prentice requires the city to maintain at least 50 monkeys in the park--the future site of Santa Ana Zoo.

1952

Los Alamitos Race Track opens.

1953

International Boy Scout Jamboree hosts 50,000 scouts on Irvine Ranch.

1955

Disneyland opens.

1958

Fire starts at the Stewart Ranch on Ortega Highway in Riverside County and burns 66,300 acres in Orange, Riverside and San Diego counties before it is stopped short of Mission Viejo Ranch.

1959

Cal State Fullerton opens.

1961

Laguna Hills Leisure World opens.

1964

President Lyndon B. Johnson dedicates UC Irvine.

1966

Anaheim Stadium opens as home to the California Angels (previously known as the Los Angeles Angels). The stadium also will become home to the Rams in 1980.

1967

Paseo Grande fire blackens 48,639 acres and destroys 66 homes.

1968

Golden West, last of Tustin’s eight citrus houses, folds.

Old County Courthouse in Santa Ana closes as court building.

1969

Santa Ana marks its centennial.

New $22-million County Courthouse in Santa Ana is dedicated.

1970

Truman Capote spends 18 1/2 hours in Orange County Jail after ignoring a subpoena to testify against an accused murderer he interviewed for a story on capital punishment.

1971

Dana Point Harbor opens.

The county fields two presidential candidates, Richard Nixon and John Schmitz, an ultraconservative Republican nominated by the American Party (formerly the American Independent Party).

A gang of thieves loots safe-deposit boxes at the United California Bank’s Laguna Niguel branch in Monarch Bay Plaza, taking $5 million in jewelry, rare coins, securities and cash. It is one of the biggest burglaries in American history.

Newcastle disease hits county poultry, killing more than 10 million chickens for a $20-million loss.

1975

The federal government designates the U.S. Marine Corps’ Camp Pendleton as a relocation center for Vietnam War refugees. Many settle in Westminster, Garden Grove and Huntington Beach. An estimated 100,000 Southeast Asian immigrants will be living in the county by 1987.

1979

California Angels win American League’s Western Division pennant.

Orange County Airport, the third busiest in the nation, becomes John Wayne Airport after a Board of Supervisors’ vote nine days after the screen actor’s death. Wayne spent the last 15 years of his life in Newport Beach.

1980

About 50 county workers remaining in the old County Courthouse are forced to permanently vacate the Santa Ana landmark because it is seismically unsound.

1981

Jewel Plummer Cobb is named president of California State University, Fullerton, becoming the first black woman to head a major university in the western United States.

1982

The California Angels capture the American League West baseball championship. The team wins for the third time four years later.

1984

Using nets dropped from a helicopter, animal-rights advocates airlift goats from San Clemente Island to prevent the Navy from shooting the wild animals. Large herds are threatening the survival of several species of plants, birds and other animals.

1986

The Orange County Performing Arts Center opens in Costa Mesa.

1987

Residents vote to make Mission Viejo the county’s 27th city.

The old Gothic-style County Courthouse in Santa Ana, newly renovated to house county offices, is rededicated on Nov. 12, 86 years to the day after its first open house.