Countdown to 2000 -- Politics

Susan McCormack

With the coming of the railroad and a booming tourist industry, residents

decided that they no longer wanted to be governed by the Orange County

Board of Supervisors. In 1906, the city of Newport Beach was

incorporated.

John King became president of the board of trustees -- later to be known

as the city council -- and four trustees were named.

McFadden Wharf was the city center, and the first meeting of the board

was held on the pier at the Southern Pacific Railway Station because the

city clerk was also a railroad agent. The board had a two-room jail

built, and the main topic of the day was prohibition.

The county, which ruled over Newport Beach before it was incorporated,

was “dry.” In 1905, two petitions were circulated, advocating both

incorporation and legalizing the sale of liquor. Both failed.

Once the city was incorporated, the board again tackled the issue of

prohibition. Despite pressure from the influential -- and prohibitionist

-- McFaddens and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the board voted

to issue several liquor licenses in late 1906.

The city of Costa Mesa was nonexistent until the mid-1950s. At the turn

of the century, there were three very different settlements that would

one day form the city.

Fairview was a boomtown of the late 1800s, but had virtually disappeared

before the turn of the century. Paularino, a Boston farming colony, fared

slightly better with working farms remaining in the area until freeways

blighted the last one in the mid-1900s.

The town of Harper would become the core of present-day Costa Mesa. The

Santa Ana and Newport railroad stations, and 10 oil wells, cemented the

town’s future by 1906.

/SH Sources:

“A Hundred Years of Yesterdays,” ed. by Esther R. Cramer, Keith A. Dixon,

Diann Marsh, Phil Brigandi and Clarice A. Blamer, 1988.

“Newport Beach: The First Century, 1888-1988,” ed. by James P. Felton,

1988.

“A Slice of Orange: The History of Costa Mesa,” Edrick J. Miller, 1970.

/PH Photo courtesy of Newport Beach Public Library

/FO McFadden Wharf was the center of Newport Beach when it was

incorporated in 1906. The city’s board of trustees, later known as the

city council, held its first meeting on the pier at the Southern Pacific

Railway Station.