The goddess Pomona appears in a relief sculpture above a portal in Pomona College’s Smith Campus Center, holding a basket overflowing with fruit. (In fact, in a humorous detail, one bronze orange has fallen out of her basket and is visible on the floor below.) But though naming a college for the Roman goddess of fruit might seem perfectly natural in a region of California once dominated by orange groves, the naming of Pomona College is a more complex story. Indeed, when Pomona College was named, in 1887, the area where it now stands was mostly desert scrub.

In truth, Pomona bears the name of the town where it was founded, though oddly enough, it held classes there for only one year. The College was incorporated on October 14, 1887, and instruction began in September 1888 in a small rented house in the newly established town of Pomona. The following January, however, an unfinished hotel (now Sumner Hall) in nearby Claremont, together with considerable adjacent property, was given to the College, which relocated there. Although the location was originally regarded as temporary, Claremont became the permanent home of the College. The name Pomona College had become so closely identified with the institution, however, that it was retained.

But the College does have a legitimate claim on classical name origins, if only at second hand. The town of Pomona, from which the College took its name, was named by a prominent citrus cultivator in honor of -- you guessed it -- the goddess of fruit.