How Garden Grove got here

The long story

Nine eras that made Garden Grove

1. 1

   Before 1769

   Tongva and Acjachemen ground

   Long before there were groves, the flatlands between the Santa Ana River and Bolsa Chica marshes were home to the Tongva (Gabrielino) and, to the south, the Acjachemen (Juaneño). The Santa Ana floodplain gave them willow, tule and reliable water; the coastal marsh a few miles west gave them shellfish and waterfowl. Villages sat on the slight rises that stayed dry when the river jumped its banks — the same rises later chosen for the first farmhouses. This was worked, managed land, not empty land, and the trail network across it became the road grid that Spanish, Mexican and American arrivals simply inherited.

   • Tongva (Gabrielino) homeland
   • Santa Ana River corridor
   • Trails became the road grid
2. 2

   1769–1873

   Mission cattle, then Rancho Las Bolsas

   Spanish colonization out of Mission San Juan Capistrano and Mission San Gabriel converted the plain into grazing land, and Mexican independence turned grazing land into private title. The land that became Garden Grove sat within the huge Rancho Las Bolsas and Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana grants — cattle country, with no town, no irrigation and few fences. American statehood in 1850 and the collapse of the cattle economy after the devastating floods of 1861–62 and the drought that followed broke those ranchos into pieces cheap enough for farmers to buy.

   • Rancho Las Bolsas
   • Cattle before crops
   • Flood and drought break up the ranchos
3. 3

   1874–1899

   Alonzo Cook names a townsite

   In 1874 Alonzo Cook, a settler from the Midwest, purchased 40 acres near today's Main Street and Euclid, subdivided it, and called the place Garden Grove. He donated land for a school and a church, which is how farm towns were started. The first store, blacksmith and post office followed within a few years. Water was the constraint and artesian wells were the answer: the underground supply beneath this stretch of the plain was shallow enough to reach cheaply, and that single fact decided that Garden Grove would be a farming town rather than pasture. The Southern Pacific and later the Pacific Electric put it on a line to Los Angeles.

   • Alonzo Cook, 1874
   • Artesian wells
   • School and church first
4. 4

   1900–1932

   Chili pepper capital

   Garden Grove found its crop, and it wasn't citrus. Chili peppers grew so well here that the town billed itself as the chili pepper capital of the United States, with drying yards and packing sheds along the rail line and a chili festival to match. Walnuts, sugar beets, oranges and lima beans filled out the rotation. The Pacific Electric Red Cars ran through, hauling produce out and day-trippers in. The population stayed small — a few thousand — and the social life of the town revolved around the packing houses, the grange and Main Street.

   • Chili peppers and walnuts
   • Pacific Electric Red Cars
   • Packing sheds on Main Street
5. 5

   1933–1949

   The earthquake, then the strawberry

   At 5:54 PM on March 10, 1933, the Long Beach earthquake hit hard enough to destroy a large share of Garden Grove's brick business district and damage its schools beyond repair. The rebuild was in one story, in wood and stucco, and it is a reason downtown Garden Grove looks nothing like a Victorian main street today. Recovery ran straight into the war, which brought payroll from the aircraft plants in Long Beach and Santa Ana and the first real wave of people who lived here but worked somewhere else. Strawberries moved to the center of the farm economy in the same stretch — a high-value crop for shrinking acreage.

   • March 10, 1933 earthquake
   • Downtown rebuilt low and wide
   • Strawberries take over
6. 6

   1950–1959

   Suburbia arrives all at once

   Orange County's postwar boom hit Garden Grove like a wave. Tract housing replaced groves at a pace that outran the county's ability to provide services, and in 1956 residents voted to incorporate rather than be carved up by neighboring cities — the city was official on June 18, 1956. Population went from a few thousand at mid-century to tens of thousands within a decade. In 1955 a young minister named Robert H. Schuller began holding Sunday services from the roof of the snack bar at the Orange Drive-In Theatre on Chapman, preaching to people in their cars. In 1958 the first Strawberry Festival ran over Memorial Day weekend to celebrate the crop that was already disappearing under the subdivisions.

   • Incorporated June 18, 1956
   • Drive-in church begins 1955
   • First Strawberry Festival, 1958
7. 7

   1960–1974

   Freeways, a glass church and a resort strip

   The Garden Grove Freeway (SR-22) and the nearby I-5 and SR-57 turned the city into a place you drove through as much as to, and the arrival of Disneyland just up Harbor Boulevard in Anaheim gave the northern edge of Garden Grove a hospitality economy it never planned for. Schuller's congregation moved from the drive-in to a Richard Neutra-designed sanctuary in 1961 and kept growing. Farming became a memory: by the early 1970s the strawberry fields were nearly gone, and the Strawberry Festival had become a civic parade rather than a harvest celebration.

   • SR-22 Garden Grove Freeway
   • Neutra sanctuary, 1961
   • Harbor Blvd hotel strip begins
8. 8

   1975–1999

   Little Saigon and a new city

   The fall of Saigon in April 1975 sent hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees to the United States, many processed through Camp Pendleton an hour south. They settled into the affordable 1950s housing stock of Garden Grove and Westminster and started businesses along Bolsa Avenue and Brookhurst — the district known worldwide as Little Saigon, formally recognized with freeway signage in 1988. Korean-owned businesses concentrated along Garden Grove Boulevard in the same decades. In 1980 the Crystal Cathedral opened on Chapman: Philip Johnson's 10,000-pane glass building, broadcast to millions through the Hour of Power. By the 1990s Garden Grove had gone from a white farm town to one of the most immigrant-rich cities in California.

   • Post-1975 Vietnamese resettlement
   • Little Saigon signage, 1988
   • Crystal Cathedral opens 1980
9. 9

   2000–Today

   Resort district, Christ Cathedral, and the food capital

   The city rebuilt its Harbor Boulevard frontage into the Garden Grove Resort District, adding thousands of hotel rooms serving Disneyland and the Anaheim Convention Center, and reinvested in Main Street as a walkable downtown of patios and the Festival Amphitheater. In 2012 the bankrupt Crystal Cathedral was sold to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange, which renovated it and dedicated it as Christ Cathedral in July 2019. Garden Grove Boulevard was formally designated the Korean Business District. Today the city's identity is food and diversity: pho and banh mi in Little Saigon, Korean BBQ and tofu houses on the boulevard, taquerias on Westminster Avenue — and a Strawberry Festival that still fills Main Street every Memorial Day weekend.

   • Resort District build-out
   • Christ Cathedral dedicated 2019
   • Korean Business District

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