Our Anaheim logo carries California's bear and star over "1850," the year of statehood and the shared emblem of every Merlin Classics California place. The bear and the lone star are the state in shorthand — independence, the Republic, the frontier — printed black-and-white with the worn look of an old crate label, a WPA poster, a piece of farm signage. What makes this one Anaheim is the place behind it: the German wine colony, the willow gates, the Valencia groves, the home by the river. On a tee or a cap it reads like a piece of orange-grove California — Est. 1850 on the emblem, with an 1857 colony story underneath.
The valley was Tongva and Acjachemen homeland long before it was anyone's vineyard, and later part of a Mexican-era rancho. The town itself begins in 1857, when a group of German families in San Francisco pooled their money as the Los Angeles Vineyard Society and sent a surveyor named George Hansen south to lay out a colony. He divided the land into fifty twenty-acre vineyard lots and fenced the whole square mile with willow poles that took root and grew into a living wall — with gates at the north, south, east, and west ends of the two main streets. That willow-gate grid is still the bones of downtown Anaheim. They named it for the river and for home.
Why People Visit Anaheim California
- Tour the Mother Colony House (1857), the oldest wood-framed building in Orange County.
- Walk Founders' Park beneath the Landmark Moreton Bay fig and the recreated 19th-century grounds.
- Browse the Anaheim Packing House, a restored 1919 citrus-era packing building turned food hall.
- Stroll the Center Street Promenade and the historic downtown colony grid.
- Relax at Pearson Park, with its lawns, amphitheater, and shaded neighborhood paths.
