Updated:
October 8, 2006
wo seedless navel orange trees arrived in Riverside in the mid 1870s. A friend of Riverside residents Luther and Eliza Tibbets sent the trees to the couple from Washington, DC, where he worked for the US Department of Agriculture. These two trees, originally from Bahia, Brazil, gave birth to the orange industry of Southern California (Klotz, Lawton & Hall, 1989).
In 1902, one tree was transplanted to the corner of Arlington and Magnolia Avenues, and a fence was installed to protect it. The tree was one of the first twenty State of California Historical Landmarks officially designated on June 1, 1932.
On May 8, 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt transplanted the second navel tree outside the “Old Adobe” at the Mission Inn. The tree had been donated to the Riverside Pioneer Historical Society. Frank Miller, his wife Isabella, and daughter Allis were among those in attendance at the planting.
Frank Miller built a fence around this tree to protect it from people who wanted to strip off leaves for keepsakes. Unfortunately, the tree died in 1922. According to some stories, Mission Inn owner Frank Miller had the dead tree cut into pieces to be sold as souvenirs (Klotz, Lawton & Hall, 1989). The Miller family participated in a second orange tree planting several years later in the Spanish Patio. Although this tree died, too, others have replaced it over the years, continuing to link citrus history with the history of the hotel.
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