From Citrus Groves to Stucco: The Building History of Ontario, California

I've spent more than twenty years painting houses across the Inland Empire, and I'm the third painter in my family to make a living with a brush and a ladder. So when I pull up to a job in Ontario, I'm not just looking at a wall that needs a coat. I'm looking at a town that was planned, surveyed, and irrigated into existence on purpose — and at more than a century of homes built on top of that plan. Ontario's history is unusually deliberate for a California city, and you can read it right in the buildings if you know what to look for.

Most towns out here kind of sprawled into being. Ontario didn't. It was designed.

A Colony Built on Paper First

In 1882, two Canadian brothers — George and William Chaffey — bought land at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains and laid out what they called the Ontario Model Colony, named after their home province back in Canada. George was an engineer, and the thing that actually made Ontario work was water. He built a mutual water company and an irrigation system that carried foothill water down to every single parcel, so a buyer knew their lot would have water before they ever broke ground. That was a radical idea at the time, and it's why Ontario still wears the nickname "the Model Colony."

The Chaffeys didn't stop at pipes. George helped bring early electric power to the area, and the family endowed what grew into Chaffey College. But the centerpiece you can still drive today is Euclid Avenue — a grand boulevard running arrow-straight down from the foothills, wide enough for a planted, tree-lined median that once carried a mule-drawn streetcar. Those big old homes along Euclid are some of the oldest and most beautiful structures in the city.

A town that was engineered on paper still has to be maintained in the real world — and that's where a good coat of paint earns its keep.

Citrus Country, Then Suburbs

For decades, Ontario was citrus country. Orange and lemon groves ran for miles, packing houses lined the rail spurs, and the Sunkist name was stamped on crates headed all over the country. The homes that went up in those years were Victorian-era farmhouses first, then the Craftsman bungalows that boomed in the early 1900s — wood-framed, deep-porched, and built to be lived in through long, hot valley summers.

After World War II, the groves came out and the neighborhoods went in, same as the rest of the Inland Empire. Tract homes went up fast, the city spread south toward the airport, and that's where the real shift in how we build — and how we paint — really takes hold.

Wood, Then Stucco — Same Lesson

Those Euclid Avenue homes and the early bungalows leaned on wood siding — clapboard, board-and-batten, shingle. Wood has character for days, but in this climate it's a commitment. The sun bakes it, the dry air shrinks it, and the paint chalks and peels faster than folks expect. I still repaint plenty of those older wood-sided places around Ontario, and I love the bones in them, but they keep me busy.

Then stucco took over, and for good reason. Stucco handles our heat, our fire risk, and our wild temperature swings better than just about anything, which is why nearly every home built from the 1980s on is wrapped in it. But stucco plays by its own rules — it moves, it develops hairline cracks, and it needs a coating that can flex with it instead of just sitting on top. That's where modern elastomeric coatings earn their keep: they stretch, bridge those little cracks, and lock moisture out. Knowing what a stucco wall needs versus what a wood wall needs is half the trade.

The Stuff Hiding in Older Homes

Here's something a lot of Ontario homeowners never think about until they start a remodel: if your home went up before the early '80s — and a lot of this city did — there's real history hiding in those layers.

Lead paint was banned for home use in 1978, so anything older than that may still have lead buried under the newer coats. Asbestos turned up in plenty of building materials and textures from that era too, including the heavy "popcorn" and Spanish-lace ceilings everybody was putting up. You don't want to sand into either one without knowing what you're dealing with. That's not a scare tactic, it's just experience talking. A careful painter tests for it, contains it, and handles it the right way — instead of grinding it into the air your family breathes.

And honestly, taste has moved on anyway. The heavy popcorn ceilings have given way to clean, smooth walls and a light knockdown texture. Colors have shifted from the dark tones of the citrus-era homes toward warm whites, soft greys, and cleaner modern palettes. Today's low- and zero-VOC paints don't choke you out of the room while they dry, and heat-reflective coatings can trim a little off your summer cooling bill — no small thing in a valley that bakes from June through September.

Same Town, Better Tools

That's the part I find kind of beautiful in all this. From a Chaffey-era farmhouse on Euclid Avenue to a freshly coated stucco home out near Ontario Mills, it comes down to the same job at heart: protect the wall, make it last, and make it look right. This town was planned with that kind of care from day one, and the products riding around in my van today are just the newest, best answer to a question Ontario has been asking since 1882.

I've worked on the wood-sided old-timers, the brand-new stucco builds, and just about everything in between. Drywall, cabinet refinishing, stucco patch, commercial storefronts — if it's got a surface, I know how to finish it right. We don't cut corners. We cut perfect lines.