Pomona

Pomona got its name before it had a single fruit tree. In eighteen seventy-five, real estate investors holding land east of Los Angeles ran a naming contest to attract settlers, and a citrus worker named Solomon Gates won with Pomona, the ancient Roman goddess of fruit. It was aspirational naming at its finest.

Within a decade the aspiration came true. Pomona incorporated in January of eighteen eighty-eight at the height of a land boom, and citrus groves soon blanketed the surrounding hills. Wine grapes came first, then oranges and lemons took over.

By the early twentieth century the Los Angeles County Fair had made Pomona its home, cementing the city's agricultural identity even as the Inland Empire urbanized around it. Today Pomona is a city of about one hundred fifty thousand people, still home to the Fairplex and still carrying the name of a goddess chosen before the first seed was in the ground.