Patricia Ortlieb to Discuss Eliza Tibbets Book Oct. 17

Great-great-granddaughter of woman who introduced navel orange to Riverside will share insights into her research

By Bettye Miller on October 5, 2012

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Author Patricia Ortlieb will discuss her years of research that led to writing a book about Eliza Lovell Tibbets, her great-great-grandmother and the woman who introduced the navel orange tree to Riverside, on Oct. 17 at UC Riverside. The event will begin at 2 p.m. in Special Collections and Archives on the fourth floor of the Rivera Library. It is free and open to the public. Parking costs up to $8.

Ortlieb co-authored (with Peter Economy) “Creating an Orange Utopia: Eliza Lovell Tibbets & the Birth of California’s Citrus Industry” (Swedenborg Foundation, 2011), which chronicles the life of the woman whose persistence in developing a new source of income for the utopian community of Riverside spawned a thriving citrus industry in the 19th century.

The author spent 10 years visiting libraries, archives and government offices in Washington, D.C., New York, Massachusetts, Ohio, Virginia and California to discover more about her great-great-grandmother, whose ancestors arrived in the United States on the Mayflower, who marched with Frederick Douglass in 1871 demanding the right to vote, and whose connections with experimental gardens in Cincinnati brought the first navel oranges to Southern California.

In 2011 Ortlieb donated more than 5,000 pages of research material to the UCR Libraries, including original documents and family photographs gathered while researching the book.

A San Diego resident and an artist, Ortlieb worked as a psychotherapist for more than two decades. She also has volunteered as a docent at the San Diego Museum of Art for the past 10 years. She earned her master’s in social science at Azusa Pacific University.

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