Orange grove, Los Angeles, CA, circa 1905

About this postcard

Rows of orange trees heavy with fruit run back toward low farm buildings, with bare mountains rising beyond under a pale sky. The sender used the view to make a point about scale: "By this picture you can see how large some of the orange groves really are." Citrus was the great cash crop of Southern California in these years. Groves spread across the flats around Los Angeles and the neighboring valleys, watered by irrigation ditches and boosted by railroad shipping and aggressive promotion of the region's climate. Views like this one sold the idea of California as much as they recorded it, and growers and land agents used grove pictures to advertise both fruit and farmland.