History of Costa Mesa headed to the schools

When students in Costa Mesa’s elementary schools learn about the city’s history this year, it won’t be from a book that was printed more than a decade before they were born. The city’s historical preservation committee recently unveiled the updated “Story of Costa Mesa,” an overhauled version of how the area changed from a Native American village 2,500 years ago to today’s city of 113,000 people.

It took about three years to update the booklet on city history, which was originally published in 1982, said committee member John McQueen, who helped write the new booklet.

About 25 years, which included the completion of the 55 Freeway and the opening of the skate park at TeWinkle Park, were added, and McQueen said the committee also fleshed out information on the area’s Native American history and its Spanish and Mexican periods, which are part of the state curriculum for third- and fourth-graders.

Many of the historical pictures from the 1982 book were used, but today’s graphics are better and the committee added fun facts — like the description of the Scarecrow Carnival, which included a parade, dance and a contest for farmers that took place for several summers before World War II.

The Scarecrow Carnival was one of the more interesting facts to McQueen. “I didn’t know about it until I started doing research for this,” he said. “It seemed like something that would be in Iowa.”

The book also explains Costa Mesa of today was once a small town called Harper, and its current name was chosen from a contest among the townspeople in 1920.

McQueen said 2,000 copies of the “Story of Costa Mesa” will be given to local schools, and the committee will decide later this month how to make the other 2,000 copies it printed available to the public. Now that the booklet has been modernized, “We can update it whenever we need to,” he said. “I don’t think we should wait another 25 years.”

From the “Story of Costa Mesa:”

 A four-bedroom home in Costa Mesa cost about $9,000 in 1953.

 In 1945 a group of German prisoners of war was housed near where TeWinkle Park is today.

 Costa Mesa once had two newspapers, the Herald and the Globe, which eventually merged and later became the Daily Pilot.