Although now this town retains characteristics that might make it seem of Mexican origin it was in its beginnings entirely an American settlement. It was chosen for its good farm lands, and soon its citizens were making a success raising corn, melons, pumpkins, and hogs, and judging from the records of early chroniclers, rather strenuous boys who seemed ever ready to join with Los Angeles in the wild doings that marked those days after the gold excitement had brought to California multitudes of the bad as well as of the good.
Anaheim was the next town to be founded, following in 1857, the Los Angeles of 1781, and the two of 1851, San Bernardino and El Monte. After that the impulse for the starting of new communities gained headway, not so fast during the sixties, but the seventies marked the beginning of many now prosperous places and the booming eighties brought to birth many a city (some of them still-born).
Anaheim was projected by a group of San Francisco Germans who went about its making in a characteristically methodical and thrifty way. So far as I can discover it never went through the agonies of hope and despair that so often mark the course of utopian schemes for co-operative settlement.
The method adopted for its beginning was to purchase upward of eleven hundred acres, send an agent ahead who attended to the clearing off of the sage and cactus, the division of the land into twenty acre portions, ten acres of each being set out to vines, and to the laying out of lots in the center for the necessary