Pomona College and the Oxford of the Orange Groves

The college you are passing did not start here. It started with an idea, a small rented house, and a group of Congregationalists who believed the American West deserved a New England education.

Pomona College was incorporated on October fourteenth, eighteen eighty-seven, in the middle of a real-estate boom that was remaking Southern California. The founders wanted something like the old liberal-arts colleges of Massachusetts, but the land they had chosen in the city of Pomona quickly proved too expensive. An unfinished hotel in the nearby village of Claremont came available, and the college moved there instead. The name Pomona stuck, even though the college soon left the city of Pomona for Claremont.

For its first few decades Pomona grew quietly into one of the stronger small colleges in the West. Then, in the nineteen twenties, its president James Blaisdell faced the question that every successful small college eventually faces: how do you grow without losing what makes you good? Blaisdell looked not to Harvard or Yale but to Oxford, where independent colleges share libraries, laboratories, and faculty while each preserving its own character and community.

On October fourteenth, nineteen twenty-five, the thirty-eighth anniversary of Pomona's founding, the framework for the Claremont Colleges was formally established. A gift from philanthropist Ellen Browning Scripps funded a graduate school immediately and a women's college, Scripps College, the following year. Harvey Mudd, Claremont McKenna, and Pitzer would follow over the next half-century.

Today the consortium has seven member institutions sharing a single campus footprint. It remains a rare model in the United States, and it traces back to a Congregationalist college that took over an unfinished boom-time hotel.

Pomona itself remains the oldest and typically the most selective of the seven, consistently ranked among the top liberal arts colleges in the country.