Graber Olive House

The standard California black olive is picked green and turned black in a lye bath. Graber's were not. The family let the fruit ripen on the tree, cured it in brine and canned it unpitted, which produced something closer to fresh fruit than to the thing in the supermarket can, and built a national mail-order trade out of one cannery in Ontario.

Clifford Graber arrived from Clay City, Indiana, in 1892 and bought ten acres at nineteen, meaning to grow citrus like everybody else. He tasted olives a neighbor had cured, planted olive trees instead, and by 1894 was selling them out of the vats. His wife, Georgia Belle Noe, sold them straight from the vat room after 1905. He built a machine to grade them by size around 1910 and started canning the same year, enlarged the cannery in 1934, and stayed at it until he died in 1955 at eighty-three. The family ran it for four generations. In the 1960s the growing moved to seventy-five acres near Porterville in the San Joaquin Valley, and every fall the fruit came back down to Ontario for a two-month season.

The plant is the reason to know about it. More than five hundred curing vats, a canning room last modernized in the 1930s, barns, olive sheds, a labeling room and a gift shop, all on two acres among redwoods and a live oak far older than the business. Ontario made the property Historic District No. 8 in 2020, twenty-six elements in all.

Then it stopped. Drought drove the water bill up and the family sold the groves to their longtime manager. A lawsuit inside the family took more. The 2023 harvest failed, the cans came off the shelves, and nothing has been canned here since. An investor who was going to fund a reopening backed out in September 2025, foreclosure began that October, and the property was listed at three million dollars.

So the gate on Fourth Street is shut and the vats are empty, and whether it opens again is not settled. Check before you drive out.