User:Transient-understanding/Ontario

Tongva

Ontario was originally inhabited by the Tongva people.

The Spanish Empire's New Spain Portolá expedition found and named the Santa Ana River in 1769.

Spanish Empire (1771-1822)

In 1771, Franciscans from New Spain settled in the area, and established the Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, founding what is today San Gabriel. They enslaved the Tongva people.

Juan Bautista de Anza is said to have passed through the area on his 1774 expedition. A city park and a middle school now bear his name.

In 1819, the San Bernardino de Sena estancia was built as an outpost of San Gabriel, establishing the settlement of San Bernardino. It became part of a large, vaguely identified area called "San Antonio".

Mexico (1822-1848)

In 1822, word of the Mexican triumph in the Mexican War of Independence reached the inland area, and the lands previously controlled by the Spanish Empire passed to the custody of the Mexican government.

In 1826, Jedediah Smith passed through what is now Upland on the first known overland journey from the east coast to the west coast of North America. He used Native American trails that later became the National Old Trails Road, and includes today's Foothill Boulevard.

The San Gabriel mission's Rancho Cucamonga was given in 1839 to Tiburcio Tapia by Mexican governor Juan Bautista Alvarado as part of the secularization of California land holdings. This emancipated the Tongva enslaved there.

United States (1848-)

In 1848, the area became part of the United States following the Mexican-American War.

Rancho Cucamonga was sold in 1858 to John Rains. He sold it in 1870 to an Isaias Hellman-led syndicate.

In 1881, the Chaffey brothers, George and William, purchased a parcel of Hellman's Rancho Cucamonga land and the water rights to it. They engineered a drainage system channeling water from the foothills of Mount San Antonio (colloquially known as "Mount Baldy") down to the flatter lands below that performed the dual functions of allowing farmers to water their crops and preventing the floods that periodically afflict them. They also created the main thoroughfare of Euclid Avenue (California Highway 83), with its distinctive wide lanes and grassy median. The new "Model Colony" (called so because it offered the perfect balance between agriculture and the urban comforts of schools, churches, and commerce) was originally conceived as a dry town, early deeds containing clauses forbidding the manufacture or sale of alcoholic beverages within the town. The two named the town "Ontario" in honor of the province of Ontario in Canada, where they were from.

Ontario attracted farmers (primarily growing citrus) and ailing Easterners seeking a drier climate. To impress visitors and potential settlers with the "abundance" of water in Ontario, a fountain was placed at the Southern Pacific railway station. It was turned on when passenger trains were approaching and frugally turned off again after their departure. The original "Chaffey fountain", a simple spigot surrounded by a ring of white stones, was later replaced by the more ornate "Frankish Fountain", an art nouveau creation now located outside the Ontario Museum of History and Art.

Agriculture was vital to the early economy, and many street names recall this legacy. The Sunkist plant remains as a living vestige of the citrus era. The Chaffey brothers left in 1886-7 to found the Australian irrigation settlements of Mildura and Renmark. Charles Frankish continued their work at Ontario.

Mining engineer John Tays refined the design of the novel "mule car", used from 1887 for public transportation on Euclid Avenue to 24th Street. At that point, the two mules were loaded onto a platform at the rear of the car and allowed to ride, as gravity propelled the trolley back down the avenue to the downtown Ontario terminus. Soon replaced by an electric streetcar, the mule car is commemorated by a replica in an enclosure south of C Street on the Euclid Avenue median.

A new wave of Mexican migrants arrived in the 1880s as railroad workers (see traquero).

Ontario was incorporated as a city in 1891. North Ontario broke away in 1906, calling itself Upland.

Tens of thousands of European immigrants came to work in agriculture. In the early 1900s the first Filipinos and Japanese farm laborers arrived, and later many came to own plant nurseries. Another wave of Mexicans arrived after the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s. Mexican Americans at one time resided in the city's poorer central side facing State Route 60 and Chino.

The city of Ontario grew quickly, increasing 10 times in the next half a century. The population of 20,000 in the 1960s grew nearly eight times more by 2007. Ontario was at one time viewed as an "Iowa under palm trees," with a solid Midwestern/Mid-American foundation, and a large German and Swiss community.

On December 13, 1996, AMC Theatres opened AMC Ontario Mills 30 in Ontario, which it billed as the "world's largest theater". Three months later, Edwards Theaters opened the Edwards Ontario Palace 22 across the street. Ontario now had 52 screens on the one site, more than any other location in the United States. The opening of that many screens in the Inland Empire came about as the culmination of a lifelong rivalry between AMC's Stanley Durwood and Edwards Theaters' James Edwards. Edwards was infuriated when he learned Durwood had beaten him to a deal with Ontario Mills, and later told him, "I had to teach you a lesson".