First Home of Pomona College

Pomona College opened on September 12, 1888 in a rented five-room cottage at Fifth and White, with a handful of students, five faculty and Edwin Norton. The land boom had just collapsed, and the Pacific Land Improvement Company was holding a finished but unfurnished hotel in a new town nobody had moved to. It gave the college the building and 260 lots. The college moved in January 1889 and kept the name anyway. Claremont, which might have gone the way of other railroad townsites, got a college instead.

What the plaque says

On this site, September 12, 1888, was held the first session of Pomona College.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Graber Olive House — 6.6 mi
  The oldest business in Ontario, a cannery of five hundred brine vats — shut since the pandemic and in foreclosure.
• Planes of Fame Air Museum — 8.5 mi
  On the field where the country smelted its surplus warplanes — and about thirty of the aircraft here still fly.
• Kaiser Steel Mill Site — 15 mi
  The mill that made Fontana a steel town, gave the country Kaiser Permanente, and drew a color line at Base Line Road.
• Mission San Gabriel Arcangel — 20 mi
  The fourth Alta California mission, built on Tongva land with Tongva labor, rebuilt after arson and now telling that story straight.

More markers nearby

• Temporary Detention Camp for Japanese Americans, Pomona — 1.9 mi
• Adobe de Palomares — 2.6 mi
• La Casa de Carrión — 3.3 mi
• Site of the Rancho Chino Adobe of Isaac Williams — 5.1 mi