Old Town Temecula: Victorian Boomtown on the Frontier
Near Temecula, California
Old Town Temecula preserves a stretch of commercial buildings from the cattle-ranching and railroad era of the eighteen eighties and nineties, when the California Southern Railroad brought the first reliable connection between this inland valley and the coast. The railroad arrived in eighteen eighty two, and within a few years a row of brick and wood-frame storefronts had risen along the main street, serving the ranchers, travelers, and settlers who made up the new town's population. Old Town's character comes from commercial buildings of those years and the decades after, many with facades kept in a western commercial style.
The survival of Old Town is partly a matter of geography. When Temecula grew explosively in the nineteen eighties and nineties, the new development happened west and south of the old downtown, along the freeway and out toward the wine country. The original commercial core on Old Town Front Street was left largely intact, aging but not demolished.
When the city was incorporated in nineteen eighty nine, preservation of Old Town became a civic priority. Today Old Town draws visitors on weekends with its farmers market, its antique shops, its restaurants, and its sense of a place that has compressed a hundred and forty years of California history into a dozen compact blocks.
