Arden Town

Arden Town
The history of the community of Arden-Arcade is documented in the "Sacramento ALC Historical Study 82", Rancho Del Paso, Office of History, Sacramento Air Logistics Center, McClellan Air Force Base, California, March 1983, by Raymond Oliver. The first residents of what would become the Arden-Arcade area were the Nisenan of the Maidu tribe of Native Americans.[3] The land was originally part of a Mexican land grant deeded to John Sutter, the Rancho del Paso grant was negotiated from the Mexican governor by John Sutter on August 10, 1843. Sutter then deeded the Rancho Del Paso to Eliab and Hiram Grimes and John Sinclair. Samuel Norris was the next owner of Rancho del Paso, then James Haggin. From 1862 to 1905, James Ben Ali Haggin managed the Rancho, where he became known for breeding race horses. One of the horses bred on the Rancho, Ben Ali, won the 12th Kentucky Derby in world record time 1886. To ship his horses, Haggin built a railroad spur from his northern paddocks (Approximately where today’s Hagginwood Golf Course is), toward the current day Union Pacific railroad tracks located northeast of the present-day Capitol City Freeway along the beginnings of Arcade Boulevard. On this site Haggin's staff built 24 barns with 64 stalls each plus some out buildings. It was here that he would ship his horses mostly to Kentucky, some eventually shipping around the world.

The name "Arden" may come from the Hebrew word for garden. But the most likely possibility is that Orlando Robertson, owner and developer after Haggin, was originally from Arden Hills, Minnesota. Near the site of Haggin's barns, off Arcade Boulevard, was an “arcade” of native oak trees. The remnants can still be seen, though some of the trees are dead stumps. In architecture an arcade is a number of arches supporting a wall, hence the second name, "Arcade". Orlando Robertson was a land speculator who came to Sacramento after hearing about the exceptional lands of the Rancho Del Paso. He bought the Rancho in 1905 for $1.5 million for his Sacramento Colonization Company, then laid out the streets and developed the tracts for sale. Robertson chose street names that reflected the inventors of the period, Watt, Edison, Howe, Bell and so on. By 1916, and given the fertile soil and excellent supply of water, Robertson was able to sell the tracts to farming families, a large number of them newly off the boat Scandinavian immigrants. In fact the area around Gibbons Park was known as “Little Norway,” because of the many Norwegian families that settled there. Arden-Arcade and neighboring Carmichael were advertised as an excellent area for growing citrus, but olives, nuts and stone fruit were also farmed here. At one time, Arden-Arcade was the hop growing region of the world.

Among the oldest surviving buildings in the area are the Arden Middle School, built in 1914, and the Del Paso Country Club, from 1919, named for the original Rancho on which it was built. The first residential neighborhoods in the area were constructed in the 1920s and 1930s, as the city developed over the river, but the real building boom came at the end of WWII.

However, the real current face of Arden-Arcade was built between 1945 and 1970, and remains a fine representation of a middle-class mid-century modern community, with home developments by John Davis, Jere Strizek, and Randolph Parks. There are also large custom built developments dotted with homes and office complexes built by Carter Sparks, the Streng Brothers and John Harvey Carter. Arden-Arcade features multiple googie architectural structures as well.