Brea Wedding

Brea is a city in Orange County, California, United States. The population was 35,410 at the 2000 census.

The city began as a center of crude oil production, was later propelled by citrus production, and is now an important retail center because of the enormous Brea Mall, and the recently redeveloped Brea Downtown.

The area was visited in 1769 by Gaspar de Portol, and a historical marker to that effect 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 1200 acres to the west of Olinda to the newly-created Union Oil Company, and by 1898 many nearby hills began sporting wooden oil-drilling towers. 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).