City of Whittier history

One of the recipients of these Mexican land grants was Juan Crispin Perez, who established Rancho Paso de Bartolo in 1835.

The earliest grantee of Homestead Act land in present day Whittier was German immigrant Jacob Gerkins, who acquired 160 acres in 1868.

R.M. Town lost the land, which he had purchased in 1870 from Gerkens, in a foreclosure.

The land had been owned by John M. Thomas, a sheep grazer who had bought the 1,259 acres for $4,002 in 1879.

Agricultural settlement coincided with the extension of the Southern Pacific Railroad’s first spur into Whittier in 1887.

Work was limited to a few jobs on the oil wells in the hills and the fruit cannery, which opened in March of 1888.

The cornerstone for the administration building of the “Reform School for Juvenile Offenders” was laid on February 12, 1890, an event attended by 10,000 people.

The school opened on July 1, 1891 and provided work for many in the community.

Pio Pico died on September 11, 1894 at the home of his daughter Joaquina Moreno in Los Angeles.

When Whittier was incorporated in 1898, it was a geographically small city.

Johnathan and Rebecca Bailey (center) outside of their home, circa 1900 (Source: Whittier A Picture Postcard History)

City of Whittier tax assessment ledgers are useful in determining former occupants of your home if it was built prior to when the first Whittier City Directory was published, in 1903.

More than 4,000 square miles (10,500 square km) of the desert lie below sea level, including the 300-square-mile (800-square-km) Salton Sea, a lake with no outlet that was created in 1905–07 when the nearby Colorado River broke out of its channel.

In the east-central region is the Trans-Sierra desert, which extends along the sheer east escarpment of the Sierra Nevada range and comprises part of the vast interstate Great Basin of the Basin and Range Province. Its largest towns are in the Owens Valley, which was a fertile farmland until its groundwater flow was diverted to Los Angeles through a mammoth series of conduits built in 1908–13.

To find your home in city directories beginning in 1920, you will use the Street Guide section, which is generally printed on pink paper and is found near the middle of the book.

Looking east on Philadelphia Street in 1925 (Source: Whittier Public Library)

On a trip back to her ranch in September of 1926, Harriet Russell Strong was involved in a fatal car accident.

Snow was seen for the first time in Whittier since 1932, when the temperature dipped below 27 degrees.

The California State Water Project, launched in 1960, is the largest water-transfer system ever undertaken.

If your home was built within the City of Whittier prior to 1966, the first thing you will need to do is find its former address.

The library’s collection of these directories spans 1972 to the present.

They adopted a village concept for Whittier in 1977.

It opened to the public in 1983.

Most images in the collection were provided by community residents over the course of two months in the summer of 2016 and represent the rich culture and history of Unincorporated Whittier.

Brookfield Residential Inc broke ground on the redevelopment of the Fred C Nelles site on April 4, 2018.