Oceanside

A bit of history

Oceanside's roots trace to 1798, when Spanish missionaries founded Mission San Luis Rey de Francia nearby, which grew into the largest of California's missions. The modern city was built up around the arrival of the California Southern Railroad in the 1880s and incorporated on July 3, 1888, the same year its landmark wooden pier was built. Everything changed after Pearl Harbor, when the U.S. Navy purchased the roughly 132,000-acre Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores in the early 1940s to build Camp Pendleton, and the Marine Corps base, declared permanent in 1944, nearly tripled Oceanside's population within a decade and remains the city's defining institution alongside its surf culture and historic pier.