A Look Back - 1887: Ghost town of Fairview thrived before its decline

The railroad boom town of Fairview sprang up around what is now the intersection of Harbor Boulevard and Adams Avenue in 1887, but died out in the span of a few years.

A group of businessmen known as the Fairview Development Co. purchased 3,000 acres of land between Santa Ana and Newport Bay in November 1887, with the intention of laying out a 100-foot-wide road and motor railway line that would end at the Pacific Ocean.

“Surveyors are now laying out the town of Fairview, through the center of which will run the 100-foot avenue and motor road,” the Los Angeles Times reported Nov. 2, 1887. “The site for this new town is one of the most beautiful in California, being situated on a gently sloping mesa, giving a delightful view of the entire valley.”

The Times reported that Fairview would have one of the state’s best water supplies because the area boasted a number of artesian wells.

A Times correspondent who visited Fairview as it was being built described a bustling center of commerce with a picturesque view of the Santa Ana mountains.

“Here on this level mesa, 80 acres have been laid out in a town site, with adjacent acreage in 5, 10 and 10-acre lots around it,” the correspondent wrote. “Carpenters were busy erecting the pioneer building of the town, the [Fairview Development Co.’s] office. It was designed to place the town lots on the market on the 14th instant, but so great was the local demand that all the business lots have been sold, and a large portion of the residence lots and acreage.”

Railroad tracks linking Santa Ana with Fairview had been completed by June 1888, The Times reported.

“The Santa Ana, Fairview and Pacific road has been completed from Santa Ana to Fairview, a distance of 11 miles, the rolling stock has arrived and today or tomorrow the first train will run over the new road,” The Times reported June 21, 1888.

The Santa Fe and Southern Pacific railroads were engaged in a bitter fare war, making railway travel to Southern Californian beaches affordable for the first time to thousands of tourists from across the country. With its train station, a new, $12,000 hotel and its proximity to Newport Beach, Fairview thrived at first.

The Southern California economic boom that gave birth to Fairview was over by 1889, and the town’s population slowly dwindled.

By 1892, The Fairview Development Co. had built a natural gas well that supplied fuel to the hotel and public bathhouse in Fairview, but work had stopped on a second well “on account of financial embarrassment of the parties pushing the enterprise,” The Times reported Jan. 2, 1892.

“The town was laid out about the time the boom subsided, and has been steadily pushing forward, notwithstanding the general depression experienced through the country,” The Times reported in the January 1892 article. “It has a good hotel, which cost $12,000, a number of fine store buildings and numerous neat cottages and handsome residences which would do credit to a town of much larger size.”

By 1908, Fairview was a ghost town, but a new town called Harper had sprung up nearby.

Harper opened its first school in a remodeled farmhouse near what is now 17th Street and Newport Boulevard. The town changed its name to Costa Mesa in 1920.