People today don't always think of peppers as one of Orange County's historically important crops, but they certainly were. At the industry's peak, in 1930, O.C. produced 9,433 tons of peppers!.
Today's photos show a chili pepper drying plant in Huntington Beach in January 1947. The images come from the Bob Geivet collection at the Old Courthouse Museum, and are marked "E.C. Fogal," who I assume might be the plant's owner.
Note the pallets full of peppers being stacked in the photo above, and the dehydrator that stack was placed into in the photo below. Charles E. Utt of Tustin invented the first "chili house dehydrator" around 1905. (It was a variation on his earlier peanut dehydrator, which had burned down.) Previously, peppers had been dried in the sun. 
Little, if anything, of our once-impressive chili pepper empire still remains today. Housing tracts and strip malls cover most of the fields where they once were grown. Today, asking around for chili peppers in Orange County will get you pointed toward a grocery store or to the excellent Chili Pepper restaurant in Orange.
(Tip of the hat to Jim Sleeper's Orange County Almanac of Historical Oddities for some of these peppery facts.)
