Our Roots

The mandarin didn't start as our crop — it saved our foothills.

A Placer County story of immigrant orchards, upheaval, resilience, and the small orange fruit that became the signature of a region.

Roots across the Pacific

The mandarin (Citrus reticulata) began in China, traveled to Japan — where the Satsuma variety was developed — and reached the Placer County foothills in the 1880s, when Welsh settlers planted the first Satsuma orchards around Penryn. Remarkably, a few of those original 1880s trees still bear fruit today.

Why the foothills

The belt through Penryn, Newcastle, Loomis, and Auburn gives mandarins warm days and cool nights. Fruit ripens slowly and develops deeper sugar and flavor than valley-grown citrus. The signature crop — the seedless, easy-peel Owari Satsuma — is picked at full ripeness by color and feel, never gas-ripened.

The "Fruit Basket of the Nation"

In the early 1900s, Newcastle was known as "the fruit-shipping capital of the world."

That foothill economy ran on peaches, plums, and pears — not mandarins. And much of it was built by Japanese immigrant (Issei) families. By 1915, most of the fruit ranches around Penryn were operated by first-generation Japanese immigrants — the great majority as tenant farmers, because the law barred them from owning land. By the 1940s, roughly 2,500 Japanese residents made up more than a tenth of the county. Thriving Japantowns grew in Penryn, Loomis, Newcastle, and Auburn, anchored by institutions like the Placer Buddhist Church (founded 1902), which still serves the community today.

The war years

This chapter is being prepared in partnership with the community. The wartime story of the foothills' Japanese-American families is real, local, and still within living memory — and it deserves to be told right. We have committed to publishing it only after review with the local Japanese-American community, and that review is underway. If you have corrections, records, or family history to share, please reach out — we would be honored to get it right, together.

The blight and the mandarin's second act

Through the 1950s and again in 1966, a pear blight swept the foothill orchards, and suburban housing tracts replaced many of the rest. To keep their farms alive, growers fell back on the hardy Owari Satsuma the Welsh had introduced decades earlier. The mandarin — a minor crop for some seventy years — became the region's signature. The fruit that had waited in the wings became Placer County's second act.

Today

Today, roughly 30–35 mandarin growers work the Placer foothills, and the Mountain Mandarin Festival — founded in 1994 — draws up to 35,000 visitors each year the week before Thanksgiving. The Mandarin Orange Education Foundary exists to keep this heritage alive, and to share it.

When blight devastated the foothills' orchards, mandarins helped growers survive. Today's threat is citrus greening (HLB), and every backyard grower can help keep it out. Learn how to protect your trees →

Sources & acknowledgements

This account draws on, among others:

  1. UC Master Gardeners of Placer County — "A Mandarin by Any Other Name."
  2. Placer County — "The Placer Life During World War II: Seeds of Hope" (oral-history series).
  3. Preserving California's Japantowns — Placer County.
  4. David Unruh, The Japantowns of Placer County (2005).
  5. Mountain Democrat; Mountain Mandarin Festival.

With gratitude to the Placer Buddhist Church and the local Japanese-American families whose history this is. A fuller, footnoted account is in preparation.