Early Ontario

Ontario celebrates a rich history and heritage, which has shaped what it is today. The land that was to become Ontario in the 1880s was home only to the Tongva Indians until the Franciscans arrived in 1768, developing the Spanish mission system. Mission San Gabriel Arcángel was founded in 1771, which was a pivotal point in the European settlement of the Inland Empire. The Tongva were lured into religious conversion whether they were willing or not, becoming the mission’s labor force, working the land as cattle was raised and grapes and citrus were grown, making San Gabriel Arcángel one of the most prosperous missions in the system.

Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, and the missions were secularized in 1833. Soon, the Mexican government began awarding land grants to the Californios who were willing to work the land formerly held by the Spanish missions. The Cucamonga Rancho was granted to Tiburcio Tapia, and the Rancho Santa Ana del Chino was granted to Don Antonio Maria Lugo. Portions of these two ranchos would later comprise the area we now know as Ontario. Over the next 50 years, the ranchos would disappear and the land would be carved up and sold.

Ontario was founded in 1882 by George and William Chaffey, brothers from Brockville, Ontario, Canada, who had come to America and settled in Riverside, California. George Chaffey was an engineer and was fascinated by the challenge of irrigating the arid region once known as the Cucamonga Rancho. On Thanksgiving Day in 1881, the Chaffey brothers made an offer to Capt. Joseph Garcia, a Portuguese mariner who left the sea behind to raise sheep in the area, to purchase his large rancho. The brothers purchased 560 acres of land from Garcia with full water rights. A small portion of that land was divided up, and each lot was provided with irrigation from the nearby canyons. George Chaffey named this area Etiwanda and sold the lots, each complete with its own water rights, to settlers. Etiwanda was such a success that the brothers decided to repeat the project on a grander scale, and purchased another 6,216 acres from Garcia along with over 2,500 acres of land from others, most importantly from the Southern Pacific Railroad, which brought their new colony landholdings down to the Southern Pacific tracks. Their model colony was born. It was named Ontario after the brothers’ home province in Canada.

(1) To distribute water by concrete pipe to each lot, with each landowner provided an equal share of water rights;
(2) to construct a beautiful thoroughfare from one end of the settlement to the other;
(3) to establish a college to provide agricultural education to the residents and general education for their children; and
(4) to forbid the sale of intoxicating liquor in order to guarantee the highest class of settlers.

The Chaffeys’ Ontario Land Company developed brochures and maps boasting of the sunshine and healthy climate in Ontario, sending them back east to lure new settlers. They built a land office complete with a fountain that was used to publicize the abundance of water to potential land buyers who stopped in or passed by the colony by rail. Their strategies worked, and the colony quickly grew, with most settlers coming either from Canada or the Midwest, and many of them coming to sunny Southern California for health reasons.

In 1885, seeing the Chaffeys’ advanced principles at work in Ontario, Australians asked the Chaffeys to come to Victoria to develop similar irrigation settlements there. So, in 1886, the brothers sold their entire stake in Ontario to a group of Los Angeles investors, headed by Charles Frankish, an Englishman who came to California by way of Canada and the Midwest himself. The business was named the Ontario Land and Improvement Company, and improve is just what Frankish did. He was responsible for developing San Antonio Heights, the South Side Tract, and the famous Ontario gravity mule car line. Robert Ely Blackburn created Blackburn’s Addition in the 1890s from land that was formerly part of the Rancho Santa Ana del Chino, adding another 1,100 acres to the town. Ontario incorporated in 1891, much to the dismay of Charles Frankish, but, despite losing his foothold in the community, he continued to deal in real estate as well as other local enterprises, and remained an influential figure in the new city until his death in 1931.

In 1887, during the big Southern California land boom, Edmund and Alfred Bedford purchased 200 acres of colony lands at $500 per acre from the Ontario Land and Improvement Company. Together with their four brothers, they formed a partnership to develop their own town site to the north of Ontario, located just above what are now the Santa Fe Railroad tracks, and named it North Ontario. It was also referred to as Magnolia. They immediately began grading streets and dividing the land into lots, and within four months, a new hotel was built called Magnolia Villa. In late 1887, however, the brothers ran into financial trouble. To make matters worse, two December windstorms nearly destroyed the hotel and the town’s orange crop. By May 1888, the Bedford brothers had gone bankrupt and were in foreclosure, and their interests were sold to brothers Charles and Alfred Harwood in 1891. In 1901, Ontario attempted to annex North Ontario, but its residents opposed annexation. In 1902, action was started against Ontario that eventually landed in the Supreme Court in 1906. The fight between Ontario and North Ontario continued, and on May 5, 1906, the residents of North Ontario voted to incorporate as Upland in order to avoid annexation.

In these early days, agricultural enterprises dominated Ontario’s economy. Canadians and Midwesterners purchased land and set out their fruit trees, establishing themselves as gentlemen farmers. Primarily Asian immigrants picked fruit in the fields, which was then transported to packinghouses where men, women, and sometimes children packed local fruit to send across the United States. While many of the Californios remained in the area after California’s statehood, and several Mexican immigrants arrived through the turn of the 20th century to help build the railroads and work in agriculture, it was not until after World War I that the Hispanic and African American populations quickly began to expand. Migrants came to the area for work after Chinese exclusionary laws, the Alien Land Act of 1913, and the Immigration Act of 1917 were enacted. At first, migrant workers lived in labor camps set up in various agricultural areas of Ontario, Upland, and Cucamonga. Ontario’s La Colonia neighborhood, southeast of the city center, was established in the 1920s, when local Hispanic migration was in its infancy.

So goes the development of the model colony, offering a glimpse into Ontario’s first few decades. Its early history is rich with people, businesses, industry, clubs, churches, schools, events, and architectural gems that have helped to create what Ontario is today.