One hundred years ago this July 8, Burbank formally incorporated as a city. L.A. as Subject's latest contribution to KCET's SoCal Focus blog looks at Burbank's origins as a sheep ranch, its 1887 founding as a town, and its subsequent growth as a prominent community of the San Fernando Valley:
This Friday, Burbank celebrates its centennial. The city ambitiously billed as the media and entertainment capital of the world—and which, for much of its history, also served as a major hub of the aviation industry—hardly betrays today its humble origins as a dentist's sheep ranch.
The city is named after David Burbank, a New Hampshire-born dentist who came to California in a covered wagon in 1850. After the Civil War, Burbank moved to Southern California and purchased a 9,000-acre ranch that included all of the Mexican-era land grants of Rancho Providencia and Rancho Cahuenga, as well as part of Rancho San Rafael. His new fiefdom, situated at the eastern end of the San Fernando Valley, cost him only $1 per acre.
Burbank at first populated his ranch with sheep. But in 1884 a land boom, fueled by an influx of migrants from the Midwest, gripped Los Angeles County. Over the next four years, this speculative bubble would spawn more than one hundred new towns across the county, many of them in the San Fernando Valley. Burbank capitalized on the boom and in 1886 formed the Providencia Land and Water Development Company with a group of Los Angeles-based investors with the goal of subdividing and developing Burbank's sprawling sheep ranch.
Keep reading the full post on the KCET website.