Pomona Valley

Why you should experience Pomona Valley in Los Angeles, California.

Pomona Valley is a fertile enclave where eastern Los Angeles County's inland character meets historic citrus country, foothill college towns and broad suburban communities extending toward the Inland Empire.

Positioned between the San Gabriel Valley, San Bernardino Valley, and Chino Valley, the area occupies an alluvial basin extending through Foothill Boulevard, the Interstate 10 corridor and Mission Boulevard from the San Jose Hills toward the eastern county line beneath the southern face of the San Gabriel Mountains. Broad residential grids and commercial corridors cover much of the valley floor, with older town centers and surviving institutional campuses interrupting the postwar suburban fabric. Movement through Pomona Valley follows long east-west routes connecting Pomona, Claremont, La Verne and neighboring communities before the terrain rises toward foothill neighborhoods along the northern edge. The San Jose Hills divide portions of the western basin, creating elevated ridges above lower ground that historically supported orchards, vineyards and field agriculture. The result is a greater area whose alluvial plain, foothill edge, historic town centers and metropolitan development preserve the physical succession from agricultural valley to one of Southern California's major inland population centers.

What you should know about Pomona Valley.

Pomona Valley is best known for the agricultural economy that expanded after railroads connected its fertile inland ground with distant markets during the late nineteenth century. Southern Pacific reached the valley in 1874, making Spadra its initial eastern terminus before tracks continued toward Colton the following year. Thomas Garey led the Los Angeles Immigration and Cooperative Land Association in laying out a one-square-mile townsite around a new station, creating streets, a depot and the Palomares Hotel at the nucleus of modern Pomona. The new community took the name of the Roman goddess of fruit, an unusually prescient choice as vineyards flourished during the 1880s before citrus and olive cultivation expanded during the following decade. Orange and lemon groves eventually covered immense sections of the valley, supported by groundwater and a commercial system of packing houses, rail spurs and cooperative marketing organizations. Eleven growers formed the Claremont Fruit Growers Association in 1892, making the foothill community an early center of the cooperative movement that subsequently reshaped California citrus marketing. Mexican American men supplied much of the picking labor and women worked in packing houses, with two Mexican American neighborhoods established in Claremont by 1920 around the industry that sustained the surrounding groves. Citrus remained a dominant economic force through the first half of the twentieth century before postwar housing consumed extensive orchard acreage, leaving the modern suburban valley layered across ground once devoted to one of Southern California's most productive agricultural regions.

Higher education created a separate regional force after Congregationalist leaders began pursuing a western college during Southern California's 1880s land boom. Pomona College incorporated on October 14, 1887 with the ambition of creating a New England-style college in Southern California, and instruction began the following year inside a rented Pomona house. Its founders initially intended to build on Piedmont Mesa north of Pomona, where Henry A. Palmer contributed eighty acres and another forty acres came from two Boston sisters. Collapse of the land boom disrupted that plan, and the Pacific Land Improvement Company transferred an unfinished Claremont hotel and 260 vacant lots to the college in 1888. Pomona moved into the former hotel, anchoring an educational presence that ultimately prevented the struggling railroad town of Claremont from disappearing after its speculative origins. President James A. Blaisdell confronted institutional growth during the 1920s by pursuing a consortium inspired by Oxford and Cambridge, allowing independent colleges to share libraries and other resources without converting Pomona into a large university. The Claremont Colleges formally began in 1925 and subsequently expanded through additional undergraduate and graduate institutions on adjoining campuses. That concentration gave the northern Pomona Valley a second regional character beyond agriculture, placing an enduring academic district beside communities whose economic foundations had originally rested on citrus cultivation and railroad access.

How to fold Pomona Valley into your trip.

Pomona Valley works as the anchor for a daytime outing connecting a Second Empire residence built for one of nineteenth-century Los Angeles County's wealthiest landowners, W. K. Kellogg's Arabian horse ranch and a ceramics institution rooted in the Claremont art world.

Begin at Phillips Mansion, completed in 1875 for Louis and Esther Phillips on an immense ranch surrounding the former settlement of Spadra. The two-story Second Empire house cost $20,000 and used fired brick produced on the property by Los Angeles brickmaker Joseph Mullally, making it the first brick residence built in Pomona Valley. Six fireplaces, sixteen-foot ceilings, cherry and maple woodwork and gas manufactured on the premises distinguished a residence whose scale reflected Phillips's ascent from ranch manager to major landowner. By 1892, his fortune was valued at more than $3 million, placing the quiet Spadra rancher among the wealthiest individuals in Los Angeles County. The Historical Society of Pomona Valley acquired the deteriorating house for $45,000 in 1966, preventing demolition and beginning its long restoration. Continue to W.K. Kellogg Arabian Horse Center, created after cereal entrepreneur Will Keith Kellogg purchased eleven Arabian horses in March 1925 and acquired a 377-acre Pomona property for $250,000 that May. Kellogg commissioned architect Myron Hunt to design the ranch buildings and mansion, with landscape designer Charles Adams contributing to the grounds. Horses imported from Lady Wentworth's Crabbet Arabian Stud in England strengthened the breeding program, and Sunday exhibitions beginning in 1926 drew large crowds alongside Hollywood figures attracted to the celebrated herd. Kellogg transferred 813 acres to California in 1932 with requirements that the breeding program and Sunday presentations continue. The Army converted the property into the Pomona Quartermaster Depot in 1943, and twenty-one Polish Arabians rescued near the end of World War II reached the ranch in 1946. Transfer to California Polytechnic in 1949 ultimately placed Kellogg's equestrian estate at the foundation of Cal Poly Pomona's permanent campus. Conclude at American Museum of Ceramic Art, founded by Pomona entrepreneur David Armstrong after a lifetime of engagement with ceramics. Armstrong entered a Pomona College ceramics course taught by Scripps professor Paul Soldner in 1959, an encounter that redirected his collecting interests and eventually brought him back to Claremont Graduate School for an MFA completed in 1993. David and Julianne Armstrong assembled a major collection of postwar North American ceramics before creating a dedicated museum in Pomona in 2003. Its inaugural 2004 exhibition honored Soldner, whose thirty-seven years at Scripps had made him a central figure in Southern California ceramics. Nine years in a small downtown storefront preceded the museum's acquisition of a 51,000-square-foot former bank building in 2011, giving its expanding collection and ceramic studio a substantially larger home. The progression moves from Phillips's nineteenth-century ranch fortune through Kellogg's Arabian breeding enterprise and culminates in an art institution descended from the Claremont ceramics tradition, joining three distinct cultural inheritances that emerged across Pomona Valley.

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