Creating an Orange Utopia: Eliza Lovell Tibbetts and the Birth of California's Citrus Industry [Paperback]

California’s citrus industry owes a huge debt to the introduction of the navel orange tree—in fact, to two trees in particular, the parent trees of the vast groves of navel oranges that exist in California today. Those trees were planted by a woman named Eliza Lovell Tibbets. 

Born in Cincinnati in1825, Eliza’s Swedenborgian faith informed her ideals. Surrounded by artists and free thinkers, her personal journey took her first to New York City, then south to create a better environment for newly freed slaves in racially divided Virginia, and onward to Washington, DC, where she campaigned for women’s rights. But it was in California where she left her true mark, launching an agricultural boom that changed the course of California’s history.

Eliza’s story of faith and idealism will appeal to anyone who is curious about US history, women’s rights, abolitionism, Spiritualism, and California’s early pioneer days. Follow Eliza through loves and fortunes lost and found until she finally finds her paradise in a little town called Riverside.

Patricia Ortlieb is a great-great-granddaughter of Eliza Lovell Tibbets and a docent at the San Diego Museum of Art, where she has volunteered for the past ten years. She served for more than two decades as a trainer, counselor, and teacher specializing in training skills and therapeutic behavior modification, including assertive and humanistic psychology. She is also a licensed family therapist, an artist, and an author. She earned her BA in education and art history at California State University and her MA in social science at Azusa Pacific University. She lives in San Diego.

Peter Economy is associate editor of Leader to Leader, the award-winning publication of the Leader to Leader Institute. He is the bestselling author, co-author, or ghost writer of more than forty-five books, including The SAIC Solution: How We Built an $8 Billion Employee-Owned Technology Company; Lessons from the Edge: Survival Skills for Starting and Growing a Company; and Managing for Dummies. He has also written for the Venture Edge blog and a wide variety of websites and magazines. He lives in San Diego.