Security Guard in Pomona, CA

The area was originally occupied by the Tongva Native Americans.

The city is named after Pomona, the ancient Roman goddess of fruit. For horticulturist Solomon Gates, “Pomona” was the winning entry in a contest to name the city in 1875, before anyone had ever planted a fruit tree there. The city was first settled by Ricardo Vejar and Ygnacio Palomares in the 1830s, when California and much of the now-American Southwest were part of Mexico.

The first Anglo-Americans arrived prior to 1848 when the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo resulted in California becoming part of the United States. In 1864, the owners of Rancho San José sold 12,000 acres (49,000,000 m²; 49 km²) to Louis Phillips, a Jewish Prussian immigrant, who would shortly be known as “the richest man in Los Angeles County.” He built the largest commercial building in Los Angeles central business district at the time, the Phillips Block, which would eventually house Hamburger’s, the then-largest department store in the Western United States.