Salinas: How a Stagecoach Stop Became the Salad Bowl of the World

Drive into Salinas from almost any direction and you'll pass fields that seem to go on forever. Lettuce, strawberries, broccoli, and greens stretch out toward the mountains on both sides of the valley. Salinas is the biggest city in Monterey County and the county seat, but its story has always been tied to that land and to the people who work it.

Before the town

Long before Salinas existed, this was home to Indigenous people. The Esselen lived in the area first, and by around 200 to 500 AD, the Rumsen, an Ohlone-speaking people, had settled here and stayed for well over a thousand years.

The city's name comes from the Spanish word for salt flats, after the salt marshes that once covered parts of the area. Under Spanish and then Mexican rule, the land was divided into large ranchos used mostly for grazing cattle, including Rancho Las Salinas, which gave the city its name.

A stop on the stagecoach road

Salinas started as a place to rest on the way somewhere else. A post office opened at a stagecoach junction in 1854, and an inn called the Halfway House followed in 1856. Streets were laid out in 1867.

The 1870s are when Salinas really took off. At the time, a nearby settlement called Natividad was the bigger town. But Salinas landed the railroad, incorporated as a city in 1874, and took over as the county seat from Monterey. From then on, Salinas was the center of the valley.

The people who built the farms

The Salinas Valley's farms were built by waves of workers from around the world. Chinese laborers helped drain the swampland that became some of the valley's best farmland, and Salinas once had one of the largest Chinatowns in California. Japanese and Filipino immigrants farmed and worked the fields in the early 1900s, followed by generations of Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers who remain the backbone of the valley today.

Not all of that history is easy. In 1942, after President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, the Salinas Rodeo Grounds became an assembly center where more than 3,500 Japanese Americans from Salinas, the Monterey Peninsula, and nearby towns were held before being sent to camps, many to Poston, Arizona. Only a small share of the local Japanese American families returned after the war.

Farm work itself was the center of some of the biggest labor fights in California. In 1936, thousands of lettuce shed workers walked out in a bitter strike. In 1970, Cesar Chavez came to Salinas, and more than 3,000 farmworkers gathered at Hartnell College to support him. That December, he was jailed in Monterey County for refusing to stop a lettuce boycott. Those years helped lead to California's Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1976, which gave farmworkers a process for union elections.

The Salad Bowl of the World

Lettuce changed everything. Once growers could ship fresh produce across the country by rail, the Salinas Valley's cool climate and rich soil made it one of the most productive vegetable regions anywhere. That's how Salinas earned its nickname, "the Salad Bowl of the World." Spreckels Sugar, just south of town, was another major employer for most of the 1900s, until it closed in 1981.

Steinbeck's hometown

John Steinbeck was born in Salinas in 1902, and the valley shows up all through his books. East of Eden is the most famous, and it's set right here in the Salinas Valley. Of Mice and Men is set in the valley too. It opens along the Salinas River just south of Soledad, and follows two ranch workers looking for work on a farm nearby. As a young man, Steinbeck worked on ranches in the valley himself, which is part of why those stories feel so real. His childhood home, built in 1897, still stands in Oldtown, a few blocks from the National Steinbeck Center, which opened in 1998. Steinbeck is buried in Salinas.

And since 1911, Salinas has hosted the California Rodeo every July, one of the biggest rodeos in the country.

What it means if you're buying or selling in Salinas

Salinas has a wider range of homes than anywhere else in the county, from older neighborhoods near downtown to newer subdivisions on the edges of town. A few things worth knowing:

• Neighborhoods vary street by street. Older areas like Maple Park and Oldtown have a lot of character, but values can change a lot from one street to the next. The Seller's Guide chapter on pricing has a story about exactly that.
• Water is different here. Salinas isn't part of the Monterey Peninsula's water district, so the Peninsula's water fixture rules and bathroom limits don't apply.
• Rental rules. Salinas has its own rules for long-term rentals, and it doesn't have a short-term rental permit program. See the Buyer's Guide chapter on local rules for the latest.
• More home for the money. Salinas is generally more affordable than the Peninsula, which is part of why so many first-time buyers start here.

---

Sources: Wikipedia, Salinas, California; Salinas Public Library, City of Salinas History.