Biography
Eliza L. Tibbets (1823-1898) is most widely known for her role in introducing the first Washington navel orange and founding the citrus industry and cultural landscape of orange groves in California. Eliza L. Tibbets was a horticulturist, early California pioneer, spiritualist, abolitionist, suffragist, and renowned citizen of Riverside, California.
Patricia Ortlieb is a great-great-granddaughter of Eliza Lovell Tibbets and a docent at the San Diego Museum of Art, where she has volunteered for the past ten years. She served for more than two decades as a trainer, counselor, and teacher specializing in training skills and therapeutic behavior modification, including assertive and humanistic psychology. She is also a licensed family therapist, an artist, and an author. She earned her BA in education and art history at California State University and her MA in social science at Azusa Pacific University. She lives in San Diego.*
*excerpt taken from "Creating an Orange Utopia: Eliza Lovell Tibbets and the Birth of California's Citrus Industry" by Patricia Ortlieb and Peter Economy. Swedenborg Foundation Press, 2011.
From the guide to the Patricia Ortlieb collection on Eliza L. Tibbets, circa 1850-2009, undated., 1850-1950., (Rivera Library. Special Collections Department.)
