Etan Does LA 213: Glendora Bougainvillea | Los Angeles historic landmarks

National Register visit 213: Glendora Bougainvillea 📍Corner of Bennett & Minnesota Avenues, Glendora
It’s summer-ish, which means it’s peak bougainvillea season. In the US, this thorny vine with its bright magenta flowers only grows year-round in SoCal and parts of Florida. So let’s celebrate its rare glory by checking out the largest known planting of the vine in the continental United States: the famous Glendora Bougainvillea, wrapped around the trunks of 25-odd palm trees on a residential corner. At their peak in the ‘30s/’40s, the plants climbed 70 feet up the tree trunks.
These were planted in the 1900-1903 range by the Hamlins, Reuben & Helen, a pair of wealthy Canadian farmers who had moved to Glendora in the 1890s and started a successful orange grove. SO successful in fact, that he began the tradition of sending Glendora oranges to the White House during the Taft presidency.
So yes, the Glendora Bougainvillea is big and beautiful, but what makes it HISTORIC is the history that it preserves of California’s citrus industry around the turn of the century. By 1920, citrus was the #2 industry in LA, right after oil. People came here to grow oranges, to work in the citrus fields, and pictures of endless groves were beamed throughout the country on postcards and crate labels and advertisements, depicting SoCal as a land of health and sunshine. Bougainvillea was a very common landscaping feature surrounding the groves of the San Gabriel Valley.
In the 1980s the Hamlins’ orange grove was replaced by condos (the development is called “Rancho del Bougainvillea, natch”) but the bougainvillea are intact, and particularly beautiful in June/July, set against the blue sky and snow-capped mountains. Check ‘em out, and tell ‘em Etan Does LA sent ya. Let me know if you get a response.
I'm visiting all 600+ LA landmarks on the National Register of Historic Places. Read more about this one and many more at EtanDoesLA.com: etandoesla.com/213-glendora-b...
Historic photo credits:
📷1: Orange groves of Glendora, CA, 1910 (California State Library)
📷2: Man looking at orange groves in Glendora, 1930 (PD, via USC Libraries & California Historical Society)
📷3: Citrus orchard in Glendora, 1910 (PD, via Citrus College Archive Collection)
📷4: Citrus Growers Association, early 1900s (Citrus College Archive Collection)
📷5: Portrait of Louis Antoine de Bougainville (PD)
#glendora #bougainvillea #plants #vines #horticulture #lahistory #sgv #sangabrielvalley #nationalregister

[@aleideannabezoen]

Beautiful, I really appreciate the mini history lesson as well, thank you!