Here's a happy birthday wish to Arden Arcade from our history partner, Vintage Arden Arcade, saying, "As an unincorporated community within a county government, Arden Arcade doesn’t have a designated birthday. The date of incorporation generally becomes the date cities choose to celebrate as a birthday. We also don’t have a whole lot of attention given to the question, or to our history in general. Well, time to end that. We've been searching our history for 10 years now, and believe we can assign the day of May 11, 1910 as the day that we can say the community of Arden Arcade was begun. No longer Haggin’s horse ranch, and not an extension of Sacramento, but a unique and historically rich community separate from the lands surrounding it."

May 11, 1910, 116 years ago today…

On May 11, 1910, Orlando Alison Robertson, a land speculator from Arden Hills Minnesota and CEO of the Sacramento Valley Colonization Company closed purchase on the majority of James Haggin’s Del Paso Ranch, which took in all of today’s Arden Arcade. Robertson’s company then proceeded to name the roads, then made of crushed rock, compacted and oiled, after the inventors of the time, Fulton, Marconi, Edison, Bell, Watt, Howe etc. Country Club Road, Fulton Avenue and H Street were the main roads. H Street, a major artery out of Sacramento remained H street well past Carmichael but would in time become Fair Oaks Blvd., Country Club Road would become Marconi Avenue. By July of that same year, Robertson had layed out the land in 10 & 20 acre lots and put out the word that the finest farm land in America was for sale, and in close proximity to the conveniences of the city of Sacramento. Farming families, city dwellers (many from San Francisco and the Minneapolis St. Paul area (Robertson’s home) and developers got in line to purchase the land. In 1911, Robertson sold the land for Del Paso Country Club to investors, and gifted them $8000 for a club house. 

Soon after there was extensive farming of nuts, citrus, olives and four dairies. Arcade (then in North Sac) and Arden (1914). Schools were the early grade schools, with San Juan and Grant the high schools for the older students. The Arcade Farm Bureau held a fair every August right before the state fair, with dinner and dancing afterward, adults only. It was held at Arcade School.  And of course, many belonged to Del Paso Country Club. For the better part of 40 years, Arden Arcade farming families worked the land and celebrated their lives and prosperity as a community. 

Soon after the end of World War 2, the landscape changed dramatically. With the building of McClellan AFB and the mighty explosion of postwar newlyweds in Sacramento County, there was a need for housing them. Developers came out to the country and began offering the farmers good money for their land, and pretty soon, the sounds of saws and hammers and the smell of newly cut lumber was everywhere.

Signs advertising homes for sale popped up in West Arden Arcade first, then spread quickly to the east and south. Stores, schools, churches and parks filled in the community, and with the construction of Town and Country Village in 1946-8 came an immense number of home buyers, eager to relocate into the country that now included fine shopping. Before long, Arden Arcade, and our sister community of Carmichael, were considered number one in location, location, location, and in 20 short years, land for any sort of development was postage stamp sized and very hard to find. Homes and commercial buildings were designed and built by some of the best and most creative builder/architects in California, if not the nation. Our postwar families had almost everything a growing family could want, and they thrived. A generation and a half later, the new suburb communities of Elk Grove and Roseville were drawing a new crop of newlyweds out to another “country area” and Arden Arcade has had to consider the realities of change, and our future going forward, though our County government has limited funding and far too many interests outside our own. We may yet someday realize an incorporation date for our birthday, but for now we can look back to the laying out of the lands, streets and highways in 1910 as the first step toward the Arden Arcade we know today. From vast expanses of land, to grain fields, orchards and dairies, and finally to our amazing Mid Century Community, we can thank Orlando Robertson for purchasing the acreage that made it all happen 116 years ago today.