City of Whittier careers

Whittier began in 1887 as a Quaker colony, laid out by the Pickering Land and Water Company on a former ranch and named for the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier. The founders reserved 20 acres for a college, which became Whittier College, and the community incorporated as a city in 1898 with 585 residents.

Early Whittier ran on citrus, walnuts, and oil, with three railroads and a new water system carrying it into the twentieth century; Depression-era WPA crews left improvements in Penn Park that are still in use. After World War II the orchards and oil fields gave way to homes, distribution, and manufacturing tied to Los Angeles, and annexations helped push the population to 72,863 by 1970. The Whittier State School, developed in 1891 with help from town pioneer Hervey Lindley, brought early jobs and operated under later names until 2004. The city that emerged is an established Los Angeles County suburb with a long civic memory; its own planning pages preserve this history in unusual detail, which tells you something about how the place regards itself. For anyone weighing Whittier as an employer, that's the context: a built-out community, more than 125 years past incorporation, whose city government now does the work of maintaining what a century of growth left behind.