Before it was known for avocados and art, Fallbrook was a center of the olive industry.
“The Olive Scores Again This Year and Demands First Place as a Money Crop in This District,” proclaimed the headline of a January 1913 article in the Fallbrook Enterprise.
Fallbrook Historical Society
Red Mountain Ranch, shown in a photo taken about 1892, was an early center of olive production in Fallbrook.
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“The olive seems determined to dethrone the citrus crop as king in this part of Southern California,” the article said.
From 1913 to 1915, olives were the largest cash crop in the Fallbrook area, according to a 1998 essay by Don Rivers of the Fallbrook Historical Society.
One of the first large cultivators of olives in Fallbrook was Dr. Charles Pratt.
An Easterner by birth who came west for health reasons, Pratt began growing olives and lemons on his Loma Ranch about 1895, according to Rivers' essay.
The ranch, which was at the southern end of Alturas Road, had its own olive press and bottling plant producing “approximately 15,000 gallons of high-grade olive oil annually until 1919,” Rivers wrote.
Another early center of olive production was the Red Mountain Ranch, which was northeast of Fallbrook at the top end of Live Oak Canyon. The ranch harvested 150 tons of olives in 1910, according to a March 1911 Fallbrook Enterprise article.
J.M. Cook, then superintendent of Red Mountain Ranch, wrote a front-page article in the May 6, 1911, Enterprise in which he said Fallbrook's “granite soil is especially adapted to the peach, pear, lemon, orange and the olive.”
While noting the predominance of grain farming in the area for many years, Cook wrote that the grain farmers' place was “being rapidly taken by those who know the value of the soil for other purposes.”
Olive groves and processing facilities proliferated in the Fallbrook area for a time. By early 1917, many local growers were members of the California Associated Olive Growers.
Under the auspices of the association, a cannery was opened in March 1917 on Fallbrook Street. The building, located between Main Avenue and Mission Road, now houses Fallbrook Fertilizer, Feed and Farm Supply.
The first shipment left the plant March 5, 1917. A total of 1,200 cases of 48 cans each headed for New York, according to a newspaper article from that time.
A 1978 Fallbrook Enterprise article recounted a 1920s banking deal in which an olive grower sought a loan from Citizens Commercial Bank, then at Alvarado Street and Main Avenue. When the bank asked the grower for collateral, the grower said he had nothing to offer but olive oil. The bank lent the money after the grower “brought in a load of olive oil in five gallon tins which were stored on the bank floor.” When the loan was repaid, the man got his oil back.
As with other cash crops traded on the national and world markets, the olive was subject to steep fluctuations of demand. Newspaper accounts on file at the Fallbrook Historical Society show that within a year of the olive cannery's opening it was also processing tomatoes, spinach and other fruits and vegetables to remain profitable.
World War I led to an upsurge in demand for all kinds of produce, stimulating production in Fallbrook. However, the end of World War I brought an end to tariffs on foreign olives and olive oil, resulting in a flood of imports from Italy, Greece and elsewhere that undercut local olive growers.
A similar flood of olive imports would follow World War II, by which time the olive had been eclipsed in local prominence by citrus and avocados.
According to Don Rivers' 1998 essay, Red Mountain Ranch, under a succession of owners, was processing olives into the late 1970s.
Today, other than individual souvenirs in private homes, Red Mountain olive oil bottles can be seen only as exhibits in the Fallbrook Historical Museum. Scattered groves of olive trees remain, along with street names such as Olive Hill Road and Olive Avenue, as reminders of Fallbrook's olive days.
Vincent Nicholas Rossi is a freelance writer in Rancho Bernardo.
