Saturday, August 27, 2011
The Day Mira Loma Got its Name
I love going through the historic archive of the Los Angeles Times. Because the Press Enterprise is not on line the Times is the next best substitute. Last night I was looking for articles about bootlegging in Wineville by looking for any articles about Wineville between 1920 and 1933. I admit I could do this stuff 24 hours a day, it is so fun! Who knows what you might find? Well, last night I was rewarded with one of those random things I never expected. An article popped up which said that as of November 1, 1930 Wineville would cease to exist and the town would be known as Mira Loma. Because the area was unincorporated, changing the name required a name change for the post office and for the Union Pacific railroad station. So, there you go folks. November 1, 1930 is officially the day Mira Loma came to be! I hope someone out there is as excited by this piece of information as I am! Whooo whooo!!!!
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Tom Patterson in "Landmarks of Riverside" (1964) has a good article on p 111 about Mira Loma history, and he mentions the name change from Wineville "in prohibition times ... about 1930" but does not give a definite date.
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The name Wineville had probably been suggested in 1906 by Charles Stern, the largest local landowner at the time, whose winery was located on Etiwanda about a mile north of the UP railroad. But during prohibition the winery was converted to a cannery.
See Appendix B of “A Brief History of Eastvale”
ReplyDeleteFrom San Bernardino Sun, 30 October 2007
1930 – November 1 – The community of Wineville officially changed its name to Mira Loma. The change was made to create a “drier” name in those Prohibition days.
= Loren
I thought it was changed because of the Chicken Coop Murders?
ReplyDeleteA couple interesting items I came across recently:
ReplyDelete1) The "Sacramento Bee", Oct 20, 1930, states that the application for the rename for Wineville to Mira Loma did not include the murders as a reason for the change, but only that they wanted to move away from the pre-prohibition name that is out of date.
2) The Pomona "Progress Bulletin", Oct 18, 1930, states that Wineville was designated "Windsor" during WWI, then later changed back to Wineville.
The 1950 census in the Etiwanda/Lorena streets area (near the river) shows the area as Pedley. First they started to write West Riverside. Then they crossed that out and wrote Pedley. The addresses used by the residents were Mira Loma. Certainly, by 1950, residents there thought they lived in Mira Loma! The census takers didn’t know where they were.
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