Named in 1916 after the Ventura County town of Moorpark, which itself was named after an apricot. (See Saticoy Street for why the Valley has so many Ventura County-derived street names.) Native to China, the Moorpark apricot was allegedly introduced to the West in 1760 when it was cultivated at the Moor Park estate in Hertfordshire, England. (The earliest reference I found to the fruit was in 1780.) Thomas Jefferson had Moorpark trees planted at his Monticello estate in 1791-1792, whereupon the apricot began gaining popularity in the U.S. Here in California, the Moorpark was first propagated in San Jose in the 1860s. The state’s apricot industry not only flourished in Ventura County, where Moorpark was established in 1900, but here too in the San Fernando Valley – at least up until the 1940s, when urbanization and insufficient irrigation spelled doom for local orchards. California still grows 95% of America’s apricots, mostly in Stanislaus County, but Turkey and Iran grow the most in the world.
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