Orange County's Original Courthouse

The bronze lists three decisions and names no one in them. The farm labor case was the Irvine Company's: in 1941 this court held that every worker on the Irvine ranch counted as agricultural labor, exempt from the unemployment insurance law. The whipstock cases of the 1930s concerned slant drilling, wells bent off the vertical to reach oil under neighbouring ground. The Overell trial of 1947 ran 133 days before Beulah Overell and George Gollum were acquitted of blowing up her parents' yacht in Newport Harbor, and California tightened its rules on selling explosives.

What the plaque says

Orange County Courthouse Built in 1900 of Arizona red sandstone, this is the oldest existing county courthouse in Southern California. Significant and far-reaching court decisions were handed down here, including the "Whipstock" case which dealt with slant oil drilling, interpretation of farm labor law, and the Overell trial resulting in law regulating explosives. California Registered Historical Landmark No. 837 Plaque placed by the State Department of Parks and Recreation in cooperation with the Orange County Board of Supervisors and Let's Improve Santa Ana (L.I.S.A.). March 11, 1970

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Puvungna — 15 mi
  The Acjachemen and Tongva place of creation: twenty-two acres of open ground on a university campus, still not in the hands of its people.
• Planes of Fame Air Museum — 21 mi
  On the field where the country smelted its surplus warplanes — and about thirty of the aircraft here still fly.
• Domínguez Rancho Adobe — 22 mi
  The first Spanish land grant in California contained the whole harbor, and in 1846 fifty Californio lancers turned back three hundred Marines on it.
• Drum Barracks — 22 mi
  The Union Army built its Southern California headquarters in a county that had voted against Lincoln two to one, and stabled the Army camels here.

More markers nearby

• Red Hill — 4.4 mi
• Old Santa Ana — 6.1 mi
• Diego Sepúlveda Adobe — 6.6 mi
• Pioneer House of the Mother Colony — 6.8 mi