Victoria Avenue 🍊 Riverside's Queen of Orange Roads and the Labels It Packed

🍊 Three of my favorite orange crate labels all come from the same small packing outfit in Riverside, California. One shows a queen in a gold crown, one shows a bearded president, and one shows nothing but a long, straight road lined with palm trees and a little motorcar heading off toward the clouds.

They all carry the same name at the bottom: the Victoria Avenue Citrus Association. And behind that name is one of the best stories in California's citrus history. It has a pair of mail-order orange trees, an Irish jeweler with a canal, a British land company, a president with a shovel, and a road so beautiful the city still guards it like a park. So pour yourself a glass of juice and let me tell you about it.

🌳 What is Victoria Avenue in Riverside?

Victoria Avenue is a grand, tree-lined boulevard in Riverside, California, built in the early 1890s to connect the orange groves of Arlington Heights to downtown. It was named for Britain's Queen Victoria, and it is still there today, listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

It is not an ordinary street. The avenue is 120 feet wide, with one lane each way and a thirty-foot planted median down the middle, and it runs about seven and a half miles. The median and the parkways on both sides are planted with trees, shrubs and roses, so the whole thing works like a long, skinny park and arboretum running through the groves.

The city named it Cultural Heritage Landmark #8 on June 11, 1969, and it went on the National Register in October 2000. People there still walk it, jog it, bike it and take a slow Sunday drive down it, just like folks did in the horse-and-buggy days.

🍊 How did the navel orange come to Riverside?

Riverside's whole orange story starts with two little trees and a woman named Eliza Tibbets. Riverside itself was brand new. John W. North, an abolitionist from New York who had already founded Northfield, Minnesota, put out posters in March 1870 announcing a colony here.

Eliza was born Eliza Maria Lovell in Cincinnati in 1823, and she came west in the early 1870s after her husband Luther had gone ahead to settle in Riverside. Back in Washington, D.C., a botanist named William Saunders was running greenhouses for the Department of Agriculture. In 1869 he got word of a wonderful seedless orange growing in Bahia, Brazil, and by 1871 he had a dozen budded trees of it.

In 1873 Saunders sent two of those trees to Eliza Tibbets in Riverside. She planted them by her house, and they thrived. The story everyone tells, and the one her biographers accept, is that her lot was not hooked up to canal water, so she kept them alive with her dishwater.

The first fruit came in the 1875-76 season, and it was a hit. The orange was seedless, it ripened in winter, and it tasted wonderful. Eliza sold budwood off her trees to local nurserymen, and orchards of clones spread out from her yard. By 1900 the Washington navel was the most widely grown citrus in California.

The money that followed was something else. Between irrigation and refrigerated railroad cars, Riverside became the richest city in the United States, measured by income per person, by 1895.

💧 Who built Arlington Heights?

All three of my labels say the fruit was grown "on Arlington Heights" or in Riverside, and Arlington Heights was the dream of one man. Matthew Gage was an Irish-born jeweler who came to Riverside from Kingston, Canada, in 1881.

Gage started buying water rights in the Bunker Hill Basin of the Santa Ana River near San Bernardino. Then, with no engineering training at all, he started digging. In the late 1880s he built a twelve-mile canal to water land he had claimed under the Desert Land Act. As it neared completion he bought another 5,000 acres of prime orange land and pushed the canal eight more miles to reach it. That tract became Arlington Heights.

The plan was to sell grove land to pay for it all, but Gage was stretched too thin. He had to sell his land and his canal to a London-based outfit, the Riverside Trust Company, Limited. So the groves my labels came from were laid out and sold by a British company. That is a pretty good reason to name the main road after the Queen.

👑 Why is it called Victoria Avenue?

The avenue and its bridge were named in honor of Britain's Queen Victoria. Gage and his brother-in-law William Irving designed a grand avenue and a bridge to sell the Arlington Heights land, and they modeled the road on Riverside's famous Magnolia Avenue, with a wide median and roomy parkways.

The Riverside Trust Company started the Victoria Bridge over the arroyo in September 1891. It was a cantilevered wooden truss bridge, built in two months for $12,000, and it opened on Thanksgiving Day 1891. In the spring of 1892 the grading began and the first trees went in, under the master plan of Franz Hosp, Riverside's pioneer landscape designer.

The Trust Company did something clever with the land, too. Every deed in Arlington Heights required the buyer "to plant and maintain" shade or ornamental trees along his street frontage, on lines the company's engineer laid out. So the beauty of the avenue was written right into the paperwork. In June 1902 the company deeded Victoria Avenue to the City of Riverside, on the condition that the trees be maintained and protected, and the city still looks after them.

🌴 What trees line Victoria Avenue?

The first plantings were pepper trees from Peru and eucalyptus from Australia, and palms and silk oaks were added shortly after. Today there are more than 300 eucalyptus along the parkways, fourteen different species, and some of the old ones are over ten feet across and more than a hundred feet tall.

Down the median stand about 1,100 Mexican fan palms. They were grown from seed by a local orange grower and planted by his field hands in the early 1900s, and they have topped out at more than a hundred feet. Riverside's history books claim the palms on Victoria Avenue were the first time a palm was ever used as a street tree.

Between the palms run rows of 'Ragged Robin' roses. Thousands of cuttings were planted in the 1920s by a group of orange growers' wives together with the Trust Company. And Franz Hosp himself spotted an unusual climbing sport on one of the median roses, propagated it, and sent it into the nursery trade as the climbing 'Cécile Brunner', which became a favorite all over California.

When red dots started showing up on some of the hundred-year-old eucalyptus in 1990, marking them for removal, the neighbors got worried and formed a group called Victoria Avenue Forever. In its first ten years its volunteers planted some 800 trees, most of them in memory of a loved one. That is how much this road means to the people who live along it.

🛣️ Is the Avenue Brand label a picture of Victoria Avenue?

The Avenue Brand label is the one that stops people. There is no fruit on it at all, just a straight road with a row of tall fan palms on the left and a row of pale-trunked eucalyptus on the right, and one small automobile far down the road. It was used on crates of oranges all the same.

The label does not print a caption, but look at what it shows. Palms on one side, eucalyptus on the other, a long straight road, and the name "Avenue" over a packer called the Victoria Avenue Citrus Association. Those are the very trees the avenue's own history names. A 1990 exhibit catalog from UCLA's Department of Special Collections lists this label right next to its account of Franz Hosp planting Victoria Avenue, and it says it beautifully: a road "receding to a bright sky with billowing clouds," with "a small automobile ready to carry the viewer along with it."

That same catalog names the artist. C. A. Beck, who worked in San Francisco, designed the Avenue Brand label, and it was printed by Schmidt Lithograph. The Boston Public Library holds a copy of this design and dates it to the 1920s.

🏛️ Who was Teddy Roosevelt's palm tree for?

On May 7, 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt rolled into Riverside and spent the night at Frank Miller's Glenwood Mission Inn. That afternoon he dedicated a 45-foot Washington robusta palm at the head of Victoria Avenue, near Myrtle Street, to Queen Victoria. Local man Cornelius Rumsey had come up with the idea and had the palm put in place ahead of time. Folks took to calling it "Teddy's Big Stick."

The next morning, May 8, at about 7:30, Roosevelt helped transplant one of Eliza Tibbets' two parent navel orange trees into the courtyard of the Mission Inn. The other one had already been moved to a little park at the corner of Magnolia and Arlington Avenues.

The Mission Inn tree did not make it. By the summer of 1918 both parent trees were in decline, and in May 1922 the local paper reported that the parent navel tree in the inn's court was dead and would be "removed and cut up for relics." The Roosevelt palm is still standing on Victoria Avenue, and the city made it Cultural Heritage Landmark #64.

The other parent tree is still alive, too, at Magnolia and Arlington. It became California Historical Landmark No. 20 on June 1, 1932. In 2019 it was put under a 22-foot insect-screen tent to guard it against citrus greening disease, which tells you how much Riverside still cares about it.

📦 Who was the Victoria Avenue Citrus Association?

The Victoria Avenue Citrus Association was a growers' packing association in Riverside. Its members grew oranges in the Arlington Heights groves, and the association packed and shipped their fruit under brand names like Victoria, Lincoln and Avenue.

It was already in the pages of the Los Angeles Times by November 1905. The 1907 Riverside City Directory lists it with Reginald Brinsmead as secretary and John G. Bayley as manager, and puts its packing house at Casa Blanca station on the Santa Fe line. Brinsmead lived right on the avenue, at a grove called "Surrey Grove." By the 1908 county directory, C. F. Streight was president and W. H. Robinson vice president.

These growers could grow a good orange, and they liked to prove it. When the Upland News printed the prize list from the Tenth National Orange Show in February 1920, there it was: "First, Victoria Avenue Citrus Association, Riverside, Trophy," in one of the navel orange classes.

The association kept shipping for decades. In February 1947 two Department of Agriculture test cars of Washington navels were loaded at Victoria Avenue Citrus and sent out of San Bernardino by rail, to study how ice and ventilation kept oranges fresh on the long trip east. And the association shows up in the Federal Register's shipping allotment lists from 1946 right through at least 1954.

🚂 Where was the packing house, and who worked there?

Casa Blanca, where the association's packing house stood, has its own story. In 1878 the Lockwood brothers bought a ranch tract there and built a homestead painted white. When the railroad came through in 1888, that white house was such a landmark that the new depot took its name, and the townsite was laid out as the Village of Casa Blanca.

Casa Blanca grew into a Mexican American neighborhood, home to the families who worked the railroad, picked the oranges and packed them. Growers sold small lots to families, which meant some of those families owned their own land early on. They built their own mutual aid societies in 1902 and 1907, and in 1917 Riverside's citrus workers went on strike for higher wages and won.

The families who came to work the railroads and the groves also started a Cinco de Mayo celebration that Casa Blanca has kept going for more than a hundred years. The association's packing house stood right here, in the middle of it.

☀️ What does "Sunkist" mean on these labels?

Two of my three labels show an orange in a wrapper printed "Sunkist," and that ties the association to the biggest growers' cooperative in California. It started in 1893 as the Southern California Fruit Exchange and became the California Fruit Growers Exchange in 1905, with about 5,000 members.

In 1907 the exchange's ad agency, Lord & Thomas, suggested "sun-kissed," and it became the Sunkist brand, spelled that way because it made a stronger trademark. By 1909 you could mail in twelve Sunkist wrappers for a free spoon, and they claimed about a million spoons went out the first year. The exchange was renamed Sunkist Growers, Inc. in 1952.

Sunkist was built in layers. Growers belonged to a local association like the one on Victoria Avenue, the locals belonged to a district exchange, and the districts belonged to the central exchange. So the Sunkist on my labels means a box of this association's best fruit, sold under the co-op's famous name.

👑 Who is on the Victoria Brand label?

The Victoria Brand label shows Queen Victoria herself, in a jeweled gold crown and a white lace veil, with a gold necklace and a diamond earring. Two oranges hang on a leafy branch beside her, and a Sunkist-wrapped orange sits at the bottom.

She fits perfectly. The avenue was named for her, and the groves were sold by a London company. The Boston Public Library holds this same design and catalogs it as "the likeness of Queen Victoria," dating its copy to the 1930s. The lettering reads "Grown and packed on Arlington Heights by Victoria Avenue Citrus Association, Riverside, Riverside Co. Cal.," with "Grown in U.S.A." at the lower left and the printer's line, Schmidt Litho. Co. L.A., along the bottom.

🎩 And the Lincoln Brand label?

The Lincoln Brand label puts Abraham Lincoln on a box of Riverside oranges, in a painted portrait with his famous chin beard. Across the top it reads "Washington Navels," the very orange that grew out of Eliza Tibbets' two little trees.

It carries the same packer's line as the Victoria label, "Grown and packed on Arlington Heights by Victoria Avenue Citrus Association, Riverside, Riverside Co. Cal.," with the Sunkist orange at the lower right. A queen on one label and a president on the other, both on fruit from the same Riverside road. Hang them side by side and they make a wonderful pair.

🖨️ Who printed these labels?

The printer on the Victoria label is Schmidt Lithograph, and it has its own history. Max Schmidt started his printing business in San Francisco in the 1870s. It was incorporated in 1883 as the Schmidt Label & Lithographic Company and merged with other printers in 1899 into the Mutual Label & Lithographic Company.

After the 1906 earthquake, when the new building opened in 1907, the Mutual name was dropped for the Schmidt Lithograph Company. That name lasted about six decades. In 1966 the firm was bought by Stecher-Traung, forming Stecher-Traung-Schmidt, which stayed in business until 1994. The "L.A." on the Victoria label points to the company's Los Angeles shop.

🧡 Why do people collect these labels?

Crate labels were never meant for you and me. They went on the ends of wooden boxes to catch the eye of the wholesale buyer, not the shopper. That is why they are so bold, so bright and so beautifully printed.

These three tell one whole story between them. The navel orange that made Riverside rich, the Queen the avenue was named for, and the avenue itself, palms on one side and eucalyptus on the other, still standing more than 130 years later. If you love California history, Riverside, or just a gorgeous piece of printing, any one of them would look wonderful framed on your wall. All three together tell the story of a single road.

❓ Quick answers

Who named Victoria Avenue? Matthew Gage and his brother-in-law William Irving designed the avenue and its bridge and named them in honor of Britain's Queen Victoria.

When was Victoria Avenue planted? Grading and the first trees began in the spring of 1892, under Franz Hosp's master plan.

Where is the parent navel orange tree? At the corner of Magnolia and Arlington Avenues in Riverside. It is California Historical Landmark No. 20.

Where was the Victoria Avenue Citrus Association's packing house? The 1907 Riverside City Directory places it at Casa Blanca station on the Santa Fe line.