Facts behind Yorba Linda liquor license legend
Yorba Linda’s longest-standing legend involves the history of the first—and for several decades the only—license allowing the sale of alcoholic beverages in the community, a tale that’s been passed down through three generations in this formerly “dry” hinterland.
As often told by oldtimers to new residents, the state-issued liquor license was bought or held or both bought and held, depending on the telling, by the local Friends Church.
However, the actual events are as intriguing as the legend that developed over the years, and how a community handled the issue before the advent of a city governing body is remarkable and would no doubt be a topic for fierce litigation today.
Participants in the liquor license story in the years immediately after Prohibition ended in the 1930s died years ago, but before their deaths, two well-respected early residents gave interviews in which they touched on the history of liquor and liquor sales in Yorba Linda.
The interviews were conducted for the Oral History Program at Cal State University, Fullerton. Hoyt Corbit was interviewed by Tom Peters in 1968 and George Kellogg by Terri Burton in 1971 and by John Tugwell in 1972.
Yorba Linda’s peculiar history regarding liquor sales began in 1909, according to Corbit, when the Janss Development Company began selling the community’s first tracts of land.
“In the original deeds to the Yorba Linda property, there was a clause that said if anyone established a place to sell alcoholic beverages--a liquor store, in other words, or a saloon--the title of the property would revert to the Janss Company,” Corbit told Peters.
“That was written into most of the original deeds in Yorba Linda,” Corbit said, adding, “There was no sale of liquor in any form in the Yorba Linda tract for about forty years.”
Kellogg’s slightly different version of the liquor license affair picks up after Prohibition, “when Yorba Linda was a very dry community,” he told Burton.
“Now, we wake up in 1932 to find out that after the Roosevelt election Yorba Linda was to have a liquor store. We were somewhat shocked. We hadn’t been consulted…but it was instituted, although it was not a serve store....They didn’t drink on the premises….
“However, even that wasn’t too good for us in Yorba Linda, so we organized between Mr. Hurless Barton, who was a deacon in his church, and the ministers and myself, and we went down to Santa Ana and asked to dispense with the liquor store in Yorba Linda.
“The owner of the liquor store had expressed a desire to comply, but we couldn’t get any satisfaction out of our hearing with the state at that particular time,” Kellogg said.
In the Tugwell interview, Kellogg noted the store “was down next to the old packing house,” and the Santa Ana hearing was to transfer ownership “to a young man in the community [who] we did not want to obtain such a liquor license because he would be more detrimental to us than the kind of place the old man had run.”
So Kellogg suggested to the others at the hearing, “The old man has invested his money here and it does seem rather wrong to say that he couldn’t dispose of it. He’d be out that money. I wonder if we couldn’t buy him out.”
Next week: What happened to the first liquor license and how it was hidden for decades. Also, the number of establishments the state licenses to sell liquor in Yorba Linda today.
As often told by oldtimers to new residents, the state-issued liquor license was bought or held or both bought and held, depending on the telling, by the local Friends Church.
However, the actual events are as intriguing as the legend that developed over the years, and how a community handled the issue before the advent of a city governing body is remarkable and would no doubt be a topic for fierce litigation today.
Participants in the liquor license story in the years immediately after Prohibition ended in the 1930s died years ago, but before their deaths, two well-respected early residents gave interviews in which they touched on the history of liquor and liquor sales in Yorba Linda.
The interviews were conducted for the Oral History Program at Cal State University, Fullerton. Hoyt Corbit was interviewed by Tom Peters in 1968 and George Kellogg by Terri Burton in 1971 and by John Tugwell in 1972.
Yorba Linda’s peculiar history regarding liquor sales began in 1909, according to Corbit, when the Janss Development Company began selling the community’s first tracts of land.
“In the original deeds to the Yorba Linda property, there was a clause that said if anyone established a place to sell alcoholic beverages--a liquor store, in other words, or a saloon--the title of the property would revert to the Janss Company,” Corbit told Peters.
“That was written into most of the original deeds in Yorba Linda,” Corbit said, adding, “There was no sale of liquor in any form in the Yorba Linda tract for about forty years.”
Kellogg’s slightly different version of the liquor license affair picks up after Prohibition, “when Yorba Linda was a very dry community,” he told Burton.
“Now, we wake up in 1932 to find out that after the Roosevelt election Yorba Linda was to have a liquor store. We were somewhat shocked. We hadn’t been consulted…but it was instituted, although it was not a serve store....They didn’t drink on the premises….
“However, even that wasn’t too good for us in Yorba Linda, so we organized between Mr. Hurless Barton, who was a deacon in his church, and the ministers and myself, and we went down to Santa Ana and asked to dispense with the liquor store in Yorba Linda.
“The owner of the liquor store had expressed a desire to comply, but we couldn’t get any satisfaction out of our hearing with the state at that particular time,” Kellogg said.
In the Tugwell interview, Kellogg noted the store “was down next to the old packing house,” and the Santa Ana hearing was to transfer ownership “to a young man in the community [who] we did not want to obtain such a liquor license because he would be more detrimental to us than the kind of place the old man had run.”
So Kellogg suggested to the others at the hearing, “The old man has invested his money here and it does seem rather wrong to say that he couldn’t dispose of it. He’d be out that money. I wonder if we couldn’t buy him out.”
Next week: What happened to the first liquor license and how it was hidden for decades. Also, the number of establishments the state licenses to sell liquor in Yorba Linda today.
posted by Jim Drummond at 12:00 PM
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