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Community Corner

The 'Iron Horse' Comes to San Juan

The railroad enters San Juan Capistrano, just as Orange County comes into existence, and causes a rift between railroad and citizens.

Throughout most of the 19th century, San Juan Capistrano remained a quiet, little town, fairly isolated, even from Los Angeles and San Diego. This began to change in 1887, when the California Central Railroad began constructing a route from Santa Ana to Oceanside. The tracks were the final piece of California’s coastal rail network and would usher in a world of change for San Juan Capistrano.

The railroad in general became the symbol of the technological feats produced by the 19th-century industrial age. In 1869, upon the completion of the first transcontinental railroad, travel and transport from coast to coast was reduced to just eight days. The far more dangerous cross-continent voyages on overland stagecoaches, taking weeks to complete, suddenly became a thing of the past.

Every small town the railroad passed through became drastically altered, and San Juan Capistrano was no different.

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Vast new markets became accessible to San Juan farmers and ranchers. No longer were they forced to slowly move their products by wagon to buyers in the north or south, or only use trading ships to get the goods delivered to far-off markets. The railroad made its products available to virtually anywhere in the United States.

Just as rail was arriving into San Juan Capistrano, another event that was  under way would also have an enormous impact on the region: the creation of Orange County. Prior to the county’s establishment, San Juan Capistrano, like other distant Southern California towns, was a part of Los Angeles County. Living so far from the county’s political headquarters often caused problems for San Juan Capistrano residents, as illustrated by the 1857 . It took days before L.A. County Sheriff James Barton could be notified and respond to the bandit’s attacks on the town.

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Residents were fed up with having to travel so far in order to speak with county representatives. So on March 11, 1889, Orange County officially came into existence. San Juan Capistrano now had much more local representation and new rail access.

One result of the railroad’s arrival in Orange County was a land boom during the late 1800s. Land immediately became more valuable now that the railroad would be so close. In many cases, just the anticipation of a coming rail line spurred plans for new towns to be drawn up and advertised, long before train tracks were even laid down.

Most of these “paper towns” failed to ever materialize; others flourished for a short time and then failed following the end of the boom. One of them was San Juan-by-the-sea, just three miles south of San Juan Capistrano at what is today Capistrano Beach. Pamela Hallan-Gibson described it as a popular weekend getaway where residents would gather to picnic, attend dances or watch Sunday bullfights.

But, Gibson says, after the land boom, a columnist of the era wrote: “Those who have seen San Juan-by-the-sea in its palmy days cannot bear to look at it now. Wrecks of the hotels, cottages and once-imposing depot are now in ashes and have marred the place beyond recognition… It looks for all the world like a desert surrounded by a thousand graveyards.”

Although the advent of the railroad revolutionized transportation and the way farmers bought and sold their goods, their presence was not universally praised. The industry was a huge economic game-changer, one that farmers and ranchers suddenly found themselves forced to use to stay competitive. This gave the railroad companies an enormous advantage and led to many disputes over rate hikes and land grants.

The most infamous of these disputes resulted in the Mussel Slough Tragedy of 1880, where a standoff over land rights between the Southern Pacific Railroad and farmers of the San Joaquin Valley ended in a gunfight that killed seven men. The fallout drew harsh criticism against the railroad’s actions and inspired Frank Norris’ famous work The Octopus: A Story of California. In the novel, Norris compares the railroad to a beastly octopus, with its vast network of railroad tracts serving as tentacles that wrought destruction wherever they reached:

"And abruptly Presley saw again, in his imagination, the galloping monster, the terror of steel and steam, with its single eye, cyclopean, red, shooting from horizon to horizon; but saw it now as the symbol of a vast power, huge, terrible, flinging the echo of its thunder over all the reaches of the valley, leaving blood and destruction in its path; the leviathan with tentacles of steel clutching into the soil, the soulless Force, the iron-hearted Power, the monster, the Colossus, the Octopus.”

In San Juan Capistrano, attitudes toward the railroad never reached such harsh extremes, but there was one quarrel between the railroad company and a San Juan resident worth mentioning. Gibson notes that it involved a woman named Modesta Avila, who was angry with the California Central Railroad for not paying her mother for access through her land.

The story goes that in 1889, Modesta retaliated by laying her laundry out to dry on the train tracks in protest. Before the train entered town, however, she removed it out of guilt. Four months later, Modesta was charged with trying to obstruct a train and then sentenced to a three-year prison sentence at San Quentin. She would become Orange County’s first convicted felon and died in prison after serving two years of her sentence.

Both for better and worse, the arrival of the railroad into San Juan Capistrano forever altered the course of the town. It changed the way ranchers did their business and fostered an entirely new industry altogether: tourism. People began traveling to Capistrano to visit the famous mission as well as the nearby hot springs. At the same time,  though, with San Juan Capistrano ushered into the industrial age, the quiet, easygoing rancho lifestyle would quickly fade into memory. As the 20th century dawned on the mission town, San Juan Capistrano would begin the next phase of its history: the modern age.

Further Reading: Pamela Hallan-Gibson’s Two Hundred Years in San Juan Capistrano

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