The Carlton Chronicle rides again!

Last week, Newspapers.com added 111 titles to their searchable database. So of course, I had to see if any Orange County newspapers were included. Imagine my surprise to see the Carlton Chronicle on the list – a paper I’d never heard of, let alone seen! Then imagine my surprise upon seeing that only one issue – the inaugural edition of February 25, 1888 – was available! 

On the other hand, this one issue appears to account for 50% of the Carlton Chronicle’s run, which continued for one more weekly issue, only to go AWOL during the second week of March 1888. 

Carlton, wrote Phil Brigandi, was “a failed townsite laid out in 1888 near Prospect Avenue and Imperial Highway in what is now Yorba Linda. It was surrounded by the Olinda Tract and consisted of scores of tiny little lots. But the Boom of the Eighties had already burst when Carlton when on the market and the town never went anywhere.”

One of the best features in the first edition is this map.

The Chronicle was just one of numerous efforts to make the doomed town seem viable to potential investors. It featured articles with headlines like "A Brilliant Future -- Carlton's Flattering Prospects" and "How We Progress: Rapid Development of a New Town in Southern California." Above the fold on page one was an article entitled, "How Blizzards Work," giving the impression that folks in Carlton were altogether unfamiliar with the concept of bad weather.

In short, today's historian isn't going to glean as much information about the few residents of Carlton as they might like from these four pages. But it's a great document of one of the many Southern California boom towns that fizzled in the late 1880s and how they tried to promote themselves.

To make sure nobody igonored it, the Chronicle's masthead was printed in red – an unusual feature mocked by other local papers, including the Los Angeles Tribune and the Anaheim Gazette. The Santa Cruz Sentinel also commented on "the redheaded Carlton Chronicle, published by a green firm in a fresh Los Angeles county burg..."  

The Chronicle was published by the "Carlton Printing and Publishing Co." and printed in Los Angeles. There were plans to begin printing it in Carlton within a month of the first edition, but the little rag didn’t survive that long.

If you know where to find the second and final edition of the Carlton Chronicle, drop me a line.

Tract map of Carlton (Not from the pages of the Chronicle.)