The Story of
Orange County

The 'Jewel of the California Missions' includes the dramatic ruins of the 1806 Great Stone Church, the 1782 Serra Chapel (the oldest building in continuous use in California), period gardens, and the famous returning cliff swallows. A National Historic Landmark and the cultural and historic anchor of South Orange County.

Completed in 1901 and built of red Arizona sandstone in a Romanesque Revival style, the Old Orange County Courthouse housed the county's courts and government for nearly seventy years. Today it is a National Register-listed museum operated by Orange County Parks, with restored courtrooms, county history exhibits, and a stunning two-story atrium.

Old Towne Orange is a near-perfectly preserved 19th- and early-20th-century town, organized around the Plaza Park traffic circle. More than 1,300 historic buildings remain — Victorian and Craftsman homes, the original 1880s commercial blocks, antique stores, and the Watson Drug Store, the oldest continuously operating drugstore in Orange County (founded 1899).

Built on former orange and walnut groves and opened on July 17, 1955, Disneyland reshaped Anaheim and Orange County into a world-class tourism destination. The original Sleeping Beauty Castle, Main Street U.S.A., and Walt's apartment above the firehouse are still in place — a working civic and cultural landmark of postwar California.

Tucked into a cove between Newport Beach and Laguna Beach, the Crystal Cove Historic District preserves 46 wood-and-stucco beach cottages built between 1920 and 1940. Once a rental colony for Hollywood writers and Newport families, it is now part of Crystal Cove State Park, with restored cottages available for overnight stays and a beachfront café in the original 1940s structure.

The library and museum sit on the original Yorba Linda lemon farm where Richard Nixon was born in 1913. The fully restored 1912 farmhouse — built by his father from a Sears mail-order kit — still stands on the grounds, alongside Nixon's presidential Marine One helicopter, a full-scale replica of the East Room, and rotating exhibits on Cold War-era U.S. history.

Founded in 1936 in a Spanish Revival building in downtown Santa Ana, the Bowers Museum has hosted blockbuster exhibitions on Tutankhamun, the Terra-Cotta Warriors, and California's Native peoples. Its permanent collections of Pre-Columbian, California, Pacific Rim, and African art make it one of the most internationally engaged museums between LA and San Diego.

Tucked into the oak woodlands of Modjeska Canyon, 'Arden' is the country estate of legendary Polish-American Shakespearean actress Helena Modjeska, designed in 1888 by Stanford White (architect of New York's original Madison Square Garden). Now a National Historic Landmark operated by OC Parks, with original interiors and gardens preserved.

Built in 1919 by the Sunkist cooperative as a Valencia orange packing facility, the Packing House sat empty for decades before being restored in 2014 into one of California's most successful adaptive-reuse food halls. More than two dozen independent food concepts operate in the original wooden trusses and concrete loading bays — a direct, walkable connection to OC's citrus past.

The Tongva (Gabrieleño) and Acjachemen (Juaneño) peoples have lived across what is now Orange County for thousands of years. Their place names, ceremonies, and stewardship of the land remain a present, foundational layer of OC's identity.

From the bell wall at Mission San Juan Capistrano to Los Rios Street to the Yorba and Sepúlveda adobes, OC's Spanish and Mexican rancho era is still visible across cities like San Juan Capistrano, Santa Ana, and Yorba Linda.

From the late 1800s through the 1940s, Orange County was one of the great citrus capitals of the world. Sunkist was born here, and the old packing houses and Valencia-orange landscapes still shape neighborhoods like Old Towne Orange and the Anaheim Packing District.

42 miles of Pacific coastline have built a culture of surfing, beach volleyball, and outdoor life from Seal Beach to Huntington Beach to Newport, Laguna, Dana Point and San Clemente — a defining lifestyle layer of modern OC.

Since 1955, Disneyland has reshaped Anaheim and given Orange County a global brand identity — anchoring a tourism economy that includes Knott's Berry Farm, the Anaheim Convention Center, the Discovery Cube, and dozens of nearby resorts.

Today's Orange County is home to one of the largest Vietnamese-American communities in the world (Little Saigon), one of the largest Korean-American communities in the U.S., and substantial Mexican-American, Persian, Indian, and Filipino communities — a multicultural layer that defines modern OC life.