Plenty of anniversaries on Yorba Linda calendar for 2019 for events that helped shape community

Many of the anniversary dates on Yorba Linda's 2019 calendar will go unheralded – save for a brief mention in this column – but each of the original events was a key contributor to the identity of the community nearly 70,000 residents enjoy today.

For example, two years ago, Yorba Linda celebrated 50 years as an incorporated city, but equally important is this year's 110^th anniversary of the sale of some of the first properties in the 3,500 acres subdivided by the Janss Investment Company in 1909 starting at $250 per acre.

Each of the deeds prohibited owners from selling alcoholic beverages on the property, a provision that, if violated, required the land to revert to the Janss Company, according to several oral histories conducted with pioneering residents.

A last vestige of the community's early anti-alcohol stance was a long-standing city ordinance that prohibited serving alcohol at bingo games, which the City Council finally repealed in 2017.

Several anniversaries mark the development of the present-day Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District, which traces its lineage back 145 years to the El Cajon School District, formed in 1874 with a one-room schoolhouse near the Santa Ana River and Yorba Bridge.

This year marks the 30^th anniversary of the merging of the K-8 Yorba Linda School District with the K-12 Placentia Unified School District. Kraemer Middle School, opened in 1959 as the first district “junior high” and now the district's magnet GATE campus, celebrates 60 years.

Other school anniversaries this year: 45^th for Esperanza High, opened in 1974; 10^th for Yorba Linda High, opened in 2009; 55^th for Rose Drive Elementary and Yorba Linda Middle, opened in 1964; and 85^th for Valencia High's first commencement – featuring one graduate – in 1934.

The Richard Nixon Elementary School opened 65 years ago and the land sold 35 years ago.

The Yorba Linda Water District has two anniversaries that shouldn't go unnoticed. The district was first founded as a mutual company to serve farmers and ranchers 110 years ago in 1909 and reorganized as a public agency 50 years later in 1959, now marking 60 years of service.

Particularly interesting anniversaries involve Jessamyn West, an author most famous for the vignettes she wrote about a Quaker family in “The Friendly Persuasion.” The versatile writer of short stories, novels, screenplays, essays, memoirs, poetry and an operetta moved at age 7 with her family to Yorba Linda 110 years ago in 1909.

Although her first paid writing was a social notes column in the Yorba Linda Star in the 1920s, her first published short story was “99.6,” written 80 years ago in 1939 during a long recovery from tuberculosis.

Her novel “South of the Angels” is set in early Yorba Linda, and “Cress Delahanty” is based on her teen years in Yorba Linda. The city's Jessamyn West Park was dedicated 35 years ago in 1984, also the year of her death at age 81.