With Wildomar on the verge of voting on cityhood, it's time to take at how the community was established.

Historian Steve Lech's great book, "Along the Old Roads," provides the details.

Wildomar's history is tied to Elsinore and that community's founder, Franklin Heald, who left his native Iowa by train in the late 1870s to seek his fortune.

Heald arrived in Pasadena, where he bought property and started a successful citrus venture. While there, Heald heard from a wealthy uncle in Nicaragua who wanted his nephew to investigate land investment opportunities in San Diego County.

The uncle offered to buy the land if Heald could find property suitable to be subdivided and settled.

Hiking in the mountains in the summer of 1880 with friends, Heald spotted Laguna Grande in the distance. His friends told him the shimmering lake was just a mirage, but the following winter Heald made the two-day trip from Pasadena to investigate.

"It was indeed a grand sight where the Lake first burst into view, although it was only about a third its full size," Heald wrote. "Small and poisonous though it was, I fell violently in love with it."

Heald had found the land his uncle wanted and wrote to his wealthy relative. However Heald learned his uncle had been jailed in Nicaragua and would not be able to finance the deal.

Undaunted, Heald turned to a Pasadena acquaintance named Donald Graham, who agreed to help make the $24,000 purchase. The two men walked into the bank that owned the land and put a $1,000 deposit on La Laguna Rancho.

However when the time came to pay the balance, Graham told Heald he didn't have the money.

The men contacted Graham's brother-in-law, William Collier, in Iowa who agreed to put up the cash as long as all three men were made equal partners.

On Sept. 24, 1883, they purchased the property and established a town.

People flooded into the community, renamed Elsinore by Graham's wife and Collier's sister, Margaret Graham.

But dissent grew among the men and in 1885 the partnership split.

Heald got the northern part of the property and Graham and Collier the southern, known then as "Car B Station."

Graham and Collier established the town of "Wildon," using the first syllable of each man's name. The next year Margaret Graham became a partner and the "mar" was added.

Collier and Graham were both Quakers and invited friends from the Midwest to settle in the community. Many of them did and Wildomar became known as a Quaker Colony.

The Hotel Wildomar opened in 1887, the schoolhouse in 1890.

A magazine writer described Wildomar's people as "industrious and sober."

But the land bust of the 1890s hit Wildomar hard. People stopped coming and those who stayed quietly tended their farms for most of the last century.

Contact columnist John Hunneman at (951) 676-4315, Ext. 2603 or jhunneman@californian.com.