Title supplied by cataloger. Hemet is a city in Riverside County that was founded in 1887 and incorporated on January 20, 1910 with 992 people. Members of the Cahuilla Indian tribe first inhabited the area. During the early 1800s, it became a cattle ranch for Mission San Luis Rey, which named the area Rancho San Jacinto. In 1895, the Hemet Dam was completed on the San Jacinto River creating Lake Hemet and providing a reliable water supply to the San Jacinto Valley. Despite a severe drought in 1898-1900 and a major Christmas Day earthquake in 1899, the town of Hemet continued to prosper. Every year since 1923 one of the city's claims to fame has been "The Ramona Pageant", an outdoor play based on Helen Hunt Jackson's novel "Ramona". In 1950, Hemet was home to 10,000 people; as of January 2007, the city had a population of 70,288 according to the California Department of Finance. A group of unidentified actors dressed as Indians enact a funeral scene, as the spirit of the "deceased" stands on a rock at the rear, during the performance of the famed Ramona Outdoor Play, in the colorful Ramona Bowl in Hemet. Each Spring from 1923 onward, with only brief interruptions during the Depression and during World War II, the people of Hemet and San Jacinto have presented this spectacular dramatization of Helen Hunt Jackson's immortal love story of the Indian maiden Ramona. The dramatization is said to take place on the actual locale of the historical facts in the play. Photo dated: April 1937.
Type
image
Format
1 photographic print :b&w ;21 x 26 cm. Photographic prints
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