The area was visited in 1769 by Gaspar de Portolà. A historical marker dedicated to his visit stands in Brea Canyon just north of town. He noted the local Native Americans as “dirty” without realizing that they used crude oil bubbling up in the canyon as topical medicine.
The village of Olinda was founded in present-day Carbon Canyon at the beginning of the 19th century and many entrepreneurs came to the area searching for “black gold” (petroleum). In 1894, the owner of the land, Abel Stearns, sold 1,200 acres (4.9 km2) to the west of Olinda to the newly-created Union Oil Company, and by 1898 many nearby hills began sporting wooden oil-drilling towers on the newly-discovered Brea-Olinda Oil Field. In 1908 the village of Randolph was founded just south of Brea Canyon for the oil workers and their families (and named for Epes Randolph, an engineer on the Pacific Electric Railway). Baseball legend Walter Johnson grew up in Olinda at the turn of the century where he worked in the surrounding oil fields as a youth.
The villages of Olinda and Randolph grew and merged as the economy boomed, and on January 19, 1911, the town’s map was filed under the new name of Brea, from the Spanish language word for tar. With a population of 752, Brea was incorporated on February 23, 1917, as the eighth official city of Orange County.
As oil production declined, some agricultural development took place, especially lemon and orange groves. In 1950 Brea had a population of 3,208. The citrus groves gave way gradually to industrial parks and residential development. In 1956, Carl N. Karcher opened the first two Carl’s Jr. restaurants in Anaheim, California and Brea, California. The opening of the Orange Freeway (57) and the Brea Mall in the 1970s spurred further residential growth, including large planned developments east of the 57 Freeway in the 1980s, 90s, and 2000s. In the late 1990s, a 50 acre swath of downtown Brea centered on Brea Boulevard and Birch Street was heavily redeveloped into a shopping and entertainment area with movie theaters, sidewalk cafes, a live comedy club from The Improv chain, numerous shops and restaurants, and a weekly farmer’s market. It is locally known and signed as Downtown Brea.
