Cypress, California | ||
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Charter city | ||
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Location of Cypress within Orange County, California. |
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Location in the United States | ||
Coordinates: 33°49′6″N 118°2′21″W / 33.81833°N 118.03917°WCoordinates: 33°49′6″N 118°2′21″W / 33.81833°N 118.03917°W | ||
Country | United States | |
State | California | |
County | Orange | |
Incorporated | July 24, 1956 | |
Government | ||
• City council |
Mayor Rob Johnson Mariellen Yarc Stacy Berry Paulo Morales Jon Peat |
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• City manager | Peter Grant | |
Area | ||
• Total | 6.590 sq mi (17.069 km2) | |
• Land | 6.581 sq mi (17.045 km2) | |
• Water | 0.009 sq mi (0.024 km2) 0.14% | |
Elevation | 39 ft (12 m) | |
Population (April 1, 2010) | ||
• Total | 47,802 | |
• Estimate (2013) | 49,087 | |
• Density | 7,300/sq mi (2,800/km2) | |
Time zone | Pacific (UTC−8) | |
• Summer (DST) | PDT (UTC−7) | |
ZIP code | 90630 | |
Area codes | 562, 657/714 | |
FIPS code | 06-17750 | |
GNIS feature IDs | 1652696, 2410282 | |
Website | ci |
Cypress is a city in northern Orange County within Southern California. Its population was 47,802 at the 2010 census.
The first people living in the area now known as Cypress were the Gabrieleno, a Native American tribe of the Tongva people, who were displaced soon after the arrival of the Europeans. The government of Spain then possessed the land until Mexico gained its independence in 1821. Mexico then lost Alta California to the United States during the period following the Bear Flag Revolt and the Mexican-American War.
The original Spanish dons held immense tracts of land throughout California, which were given in lieu of pay to Spanish soldiers. Manuel Nieto was one of the early Spanish dons or landowners in the area. After his death in 1804, his sons retained title to Rancho Los Nietos, but these lands were eventually broken up and distributed among them in 1833 by a grant from the Mexican governor, José Figueroa. Manuel's son, Juan José Nieto, retained the title to a large portion of his father's original properties in southern California that included the present-day area of Cypress. That land and other Rancho properties were finally sold to the American Abel Stearns, then acquired by the Robinson Trust, a group of investors, which eventually parlayed their holdings into a vast land speculation business.
Cypress originally was nicknamed "Waterville" due to the preponderance of artesian wells in the area, but was incorporated under the name Dairy City in 1956 by local dairy farmers as a means of staving off developers and to preserve their dairies, much like the then-neighboring cities of Dairy Valley in Cerritos and Dairyland in La Palma. After World War II, however, the land became too valuable for farming or ranching, and the dairies gradually sold out to housing developers during the 1960s, so that by the 1970s no dairies remained. Many of the dairymen moved their operations to Chino, where development is once again pushing them out of the area.