Northeast Stanton

Northeast Stanton is one of four quadrants the Orange County Fire Authority draws across the City of Stanton for emergency management, coded STN02, and it covers 570.7 acres. The zone record carries 3,469 addresses and an estimated 8,672 residents, and the county assessor lists 1,167 parcels inside the line, on 16.38 miles of street across 67 named streets, with 1,608 buildings standing on 139.5 acres of footprint at a typical height of 13.2 feet. Of the homes the assessor gives a bedroom count, 466 carry three bedrooms, 77 carry four and 33 carry two, and the years on its record run from 1901 to 1990, with more homes added in the 1950s, 570 of them, than in any other decade.

Harry M. Dotson Park at 10350 Fern Avenue covers 1.3 acres inside the quadrant, with a splash pad, two playground structures, a covered picnic shelter, a half basketball court, open green space, a walking and exercise path and restrooms; the city publishes nine parks in all, among them Stanton Central Park at 12 acres and Hollenbeck Park at 10.75. All 570.7 acres sit in federal flood zone X. School assignment is what most separates this quadrant from the rest of Stanton: 549.3 of its acres fall in Magnolia Elementary with Anaheim Union High, and the published attendance boundaries put 99.5 percent of it in Magnolia High, enrolling 1,608, and Dale Junior High, enrolling 1,002, with Robert M. Pyles STEM Academy at 601 students covering 67.6 percent and Esther L. Walter at 442 covering 26.2.

In 1911 Anaheim proposed putting a sewage farm on the J. M. Gilbert Ranch southwest of town, and the ranchers who would have had to live beside it fought it. Philip A. Stanton, a former Speaker of the California State Assembly, told them the surest defense was to become a city, and on 23 May 1911 the vote carried 76 to 65. The new municipality covered about ten square miles with some 750 residents, the largest in Orange County by area, and one of its first acts was an ordinance banning sewer farms outright. With the threat gone the city had little left to do, and the voters chose to give up their charter so the state could build roads through the territory. The clerk filed the papers on 8 August 1924. Stanton did not become a city again until 4 June 1956, when annexation by its neighbors became the new threat.

Almost everything standing here went up in one push. Roughly 570 of the homes date from the 1950s and another 214 from the 1960s, with a scattering of much older houses left over from the farm years. The street names are the giveaway that this was a family builder's work rather than a corporation's: Christy, Harriet, Jane, June, Lola, Marsha, Rochelle, Sherrill, Stacie, Tina and Yana are first names, most likely daughters and wives, laid out block by block. Chanticleer, Sonnet, Stardust and Lullaby sit among them. Harry M. Dotson Park on Fern Avenue serves the middle of it, and the whole quarter feeds Magnolia High and Dale Junior High.