CELEBRATE! : ORANGE COUNTY’S FIRST 100 YEARS : CREATING A COUNTY : Divide and Prosper : ‘Hell, yes! We bought the county from the state Legislature for $10,000. I went out and raised the money myself in two hours. And it was a rainy morning at that.’

The year: 1869. The place: the 12-year-old village of Anaheim. The issue: Herr Maximilian Franz Otto von Strobel begins what is to become a 20-year fight for the creation of a new county from Los Angeles County.

Tired of his town’s taxes going to pay for bridges and roads for the bigger city to the north, Strobel seeks the creation of Anaheim County.

Six major efforts, including Strobel’s, will fail before the lower third of Los Angeles County, now Orange County, wins its freedom.

Historians agree that the man who started it all, the man who lit the torch that even the politically powerful city of Los Angeles couldn’t extinguish, was soldier-of-fortune Strobel, a political exile from Germany and the first mayor of Anaheim.

Los Angeles County, which even today is big, in 1870 was huge. Residents south of the San Gabriel River complained that county supervisors lavished improvements on the city of Los Angeles, but neglected the southern area of the county. Getting to the courts and county offices in Los Angeles also was a hardship, the southern residents said.

J. M. Guinn, in his “Historical and Biographical Record of Southern California,” published in 1902, pointed out that ambition also played a role for many who wanted to secede from Los Angeles County. “There was another reason more potent but not so prominent in the petition, and that was the spoils of office,” Guinn wrote. “The politicians of the populous center (City of Los Angeles) monopolized all the offices . . .”

Strobel was armed with money from the so-called “divisionists” when he lobbied the 1870 Legislature. The state Assembly passed his bill, which would have created a new county of Anaheim, with Anaheim as the county seat. The county would have included all of what is now Orange County plus the area south of the San Gabriel River that includes the current cities of Whittier and West Covina.

Politicians in Los Angeles--perhaps asleep when the bill passed the Assembly--awoke when it got to the Senate. Finding a fight on his hands now, Strobel wrote his supporters to send more money to Sacramento for his lobbying, which they did.

One story frequently told, but perhaps apocryphal, is that on the night before the Senate vote, Strobel was host to a free-flowing champagne party for the senators. According to the story, Strobel overindulged so much himself that on the morning of the crucial vote, he was too hung over to get to the Senate in time to rally his supporters.

The Senate defeated the bill, and the historical record indicates that it had nothing to do with champagne; Strobel was simply outgunned by opposing lobbyists.

In his May 8, 1871, farewell speech as mayor, Strobel told the City Council: “Before taking leave, with your permission, I would recommend to the honorable mayor and common council-elect not only not to lose sight of, but to aid with all their power, a matter dear to our citizens, coveted by all our neighborhood and of the most essential magnitude to the future importance of our city--the division of the county of Los Angeles.”

Although Strobel, in the three years before his death in 1873, was no longer in a lead position, his followers in late 1871 launched another move for county division. (The residents who wanted a separate county always used the term “division,” never the word “secession,” which had bad connotations from the recently ended Civil War.)

A committee was formed to continue the pro-division battle. This group met in December, 1871, and January, 1872, in the community of Gallatin, which later took its present-day name of Downey. Despite the fact that some historians have claimed that the identities of these division leaders could not be found, the Southern Californian, an Anaheim-based newspaper, reported in 1871 that Dr. J. E. Fulton was named committee chair and Judge Edward Evey was chosen to represent the group in the state Legislature.

That same newspaper on Jan. 6, 1872, reporting on the second meeting of the divisionists in Gallatin on Jan. 3, noted that the delegates had decided to drop the proposed name “Anaheim County.” “The name of the proposed new county is changed to Orange ,” reported the Southern Californian. It was the first time that reference to a California “Orange County” appeared in print.

A bill to create the proposed “Orange County” was introduced in the 1872 Legislature, but it went nowhere. Los Angeles politicians, still angry at Strobel’s near success in 1870, were cautiously minding the store in Sacramento. The new division bill never made it to the Assembly or Senate floors for a vote.

“In 1873 the division question drifted into (elective) politics,” wrote Guinn in his history. “A county-division convention was held in Anaheim, and a man by the name of Bush from Santa Ana was nominated for the Assembly.”

The “man by the name of Bush” was probably A. L. Bush, of the settlement of Santa Ana, who had been on the hard-working, but luckless division committee that met in Gallatin in late 1871 and early 1872.

The divisionists in 1873 wanted to coax either the Republican Party or Democratic Party to choose Bush as its nominee for the Legislature. But both political parties ignored Bush, and he was forced to run on an independent ticket. He lost in the general election, and thus the 1873 pro-division effort died.

In 1874, a colorful politician nicknamed “Broadaxe” Wiseman became the new standard-bearer for division of Los Angeles County. “Broadaxe” got his name because of the way he hewed and abused the English language.

“Neither (Wiseman’s) pathetic appeals for the oppressed people of the prospective county of Orange nor his superlative denunciations of their oppressors, the county officials of Los Angeles, convinced the lawmakers of Sacramento,” wrote Guinn.

The divisionists thus lost another battle with the Legislature.

THE NEXT MAJOR MOVE for secession from Los Angeles County came in 1878. By this time, Anaheim no longer ruled as the unchallenged urban center of the area. The city of Santa Ana, founded in 1869 by William H. Spurgeon, an entrepreneur from Kentucky, enjoyed rapid growth in the 1870s.

The burghers of Anaheim still insisted that their city be the county seat of a new county, but to mollify the residents of Spurgeon’s new city, the name of the proposed county was changed to “Santa Ana County.”

The compromise did not work, however. Santa Ana thought it was nice to have a county named for it, but the city also wanted to be the county seat. Anaheim thought that was a bit much. “Local (political) jealousies and the opposition of Los Angeles defeated the (1878 division) measure in the Legislature,” wrote historian Guinn.

The rivalry between Anaheim and Santa Ana intensified. Divisionists realized that their goal for a separate county hinged on a careful balancing of both cities’ pride.

The divisionists made one more effort at compromise, this time in 1881.

A new bill was introduced in the Legislature. The proposed new county would be called “Santa Ana County,” and Anaheim would be the county seat--but only for two years. After that, any city in the county could vie to be the county seat, and the one with the most votes would win.

This plan seemed to appease Anaheim and Santa Ana, but 1881 was not a good year for local legislation in Sacramento. The legislators that year struggled with a statewide environmental problem--what to do about mining debris, called “slickens.” As the Legislature focused on “slickens,” other bills fell by the wayside. The “Santa Ana County” bill never got to a vote in either the Senate or the Assembly.

In the mid-1880s, Santa Ana, rather than Anaheim, became the hotbed of the secession movement. The prime leader for division was Dan Baker, a give-’em-hell newspaperman who was the editor of the Santa Ana Standard, which he bought in 1883.

Baker’s editorial fulminations against “imperial” Los Angeles County kept division sentiment alive during the decade, and by 1888, political elements began falling in place for a successful assault in the Legislature. A friend of Baker’s, Santa Ana lawyer Eugene Edwards (who called himself “Col. Edwards”) was elected to the state Assembly in 1888.

A skillful politician, Edwards introduced a bill in the 1889 Legislature to create a new “County of Orange.” The bill named no county seat; that would be decided by a vote of residents in the new county.

Edwards started oiling the political wheels in Sacramento to get the bill passed. To help Edwards, Spurgeon and Republican power broker James McFadden of Santa Ana journeyed to Sacramento, where “they began spreading around the largess of the Santa Ana Valley where it would argue loudest,” wrote historian Jim Sleeper in his book, “Turn the Rascals Out!” How much “largess” was spent to influence the legislators is a matter of debate.

The Los Angeles Times, which thundered against the division, charged that “politicians . . . cleaned up $30,000 to $40,000 . . . .”

According to Sleeper’s book, George Edgar, a Santa Ana businessman of that era, bragged about raising the legislative bribe money: “Hell, yes! We bought the county from the state Legislature for $10,000,” Edgar was quoted as saying. “I went out and raised the money myself in two hours. And it was a rainy morning at that.”

Whatever the cost in “political contributions,” the lobbying paid off. Edwards’ Assembly Bill 61 to create the County of Orange passed the Assembly on Feb. 12, 1889, by a 64-6 vote. It passed the Senate, 28-8, on March 8. Gov. Robert W. Waterman signed the bill into law on March 11.

The Los Angeles Times was not amused. “It is an open secret that money has been used at Sacramento to carry the division bill through the Legislature,” said The Times. “ . . . There are a few Los Angeles smoothies and a few San Francisco thieves at the bottom of the whole thing.”

Legislators from San Francisco, mindful that Los Angeles might grow and challenge the City by the Bay, were all too glad to vote to cut down the size of Los Angeles County. And even some businessmen in the city of Los Angeles favored the secession of the Santa Ana Valley to rid themselves of competition.

Unlike previous division bills, the successful one had narrower boundaries. The Edwards bill moved the northern boundary of the proposed Orange County to Coyote Creek, rather than the San Gabriel River.

This change of boundaries was unknown to the burghers of Anaheim until the bill was well on its way to passage. They were furious. The new boundaries placed their city only four miles from the county line, too far north to be the centrally located city needed for the county seat.

Henry Kuchel, the editor of the Anaheim Gazette, wrote: “If the bill had for its purpose the establishment of the county seat at Santa Ana, the boundary line could not have been arranged with more effect.”

Santa Ana indeed had engineered the bill to favor it as the site for the county seat. Guinn, in his history, wrote: “Santa Ana, in the change of boundaries, had out-generaled her rival and virtually decided the county seat question . . .”

Orange County did not become a legal entity with the stroke of Gov. Waterman’s pen, however. The enabling law said that the county could separate from Los Angeles only if approved by two-thirds of those voting in a special referendum. The referendum was held only in the area to become Orange County, much to the chagrin of Los Angeles.

But Los Angeles found an unexpected ally in Anaheim. Many citizens of the city that gave birth to the move for county independence now turned against it, vowing to get even with Santa Ana for its “perfidy” in changing the county boundaries.

But booming Santa Ana had more people than Anaheim. In the referendum election of June 4, 1889, the final results showed 2,509 votes for a new Orange County, 500 votes against.

THE NEW COUNTY was approved. But a legal question hung in the air. Los Angeles had taken the Edwards division bill to court, challenging its constitutionality.

In late June, the Superior Court in Los Angeles ruled that the enabling bill was legal and that Orange County had been legally established.

Trumpeted editor Baker in the Santa Ana Standard: “Every judge decided that it was legally established . . . Hip, hip, hurrah! for Orange County.”

All that now remained was yet another election, this time to select county officers--and where the county seat would be.

Anaheim knew it had no chance now to be the county seat. But the city of Orange decided to challenge Santa Ana. Moreover, the city of Orange offered to donate its Rochester Hotel as a courthouse if the voters picked that city.

The offer infuriated the four Santa Ana newspapers of the time. They referred to Orange’s offer as the “Great Orange Hotel Fraud.”

The election to select county officers and decide which city would be the county seat was held July 17, 1889. Santa Ana, the population hub, still had the numbers and won the contest. The vote was 1,729 votes for Santa Ana as county seat, 775 votes for the city of Orange.

Orange County’s first officers began business on Aug. 1, 1889. Wrote historian Guinn: “. . . So ended the longest contest over the formation of a new county of any in the history of the state.”