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

• 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.
• Wigwam Motel — 24 mi
  Nineteen concrete teepees on Foothill Boulevard, the last of Frank Redford's Wigwam Villages and still renting rooms.
• Colorado Street Bridge — 24 mi
  Beaux-Arts concrete arches curving 150 feet above the Arroyo Seco, opened in 1913 and later a link in Route 66.
• Cajon Pass — 27 mi
  The gap the San Andreas tore between two mountain ranges, and the doorway every westbound traveler has used for two centuries.

More markers nearby

• Temporary Detention Camp for Japanese Americans, Pomona — 1.9 mi
• Adobe de Palomares — 2.6 mi
• Site of the Rancho Chino Adobe of Isaac Williams — 5.1 mi
• Madonna of the Trail — 7.1 mi