Redlands

Redlands was platted in eighteen eighty-one by two developers, Frank Brown and E.G. Judson, who named it for the reddish color of the soil and introduced a new variety called the Washington navel orange to the land.

The bet paid off. By the turn of the century Redlands was the largest navel orange producing region in the world, a title it held for almost seventy-five years. The money that oranges made built Victorian mansions across the hills, and eight historic districts survive today with some of the best preserved late-nineteenth-century residential architecture in Southern California.

Wealthy Midwesterners wintered here, and the city developed a cultural life well beyond its size. The orange groves are mostly gone now, replaced by subdivisions, but Redlands has held onto its Victorian core better than nearly any other Inland Empire city, which is why it still draws visitors and filmmakers who need a slice of the eighteen nineties.