Whittier highlight
Historic Quaker founding
Founded in 1887 by Quakers, Whittier was named for poet John Greenleaf Whittier and remains home to Whittier College, chartered in 1901.
In 1887, a group of Quakers from the Religious Society of Friends acquired 1,259 acres through the Pickering Land and Water Development Company to establish a new community in Southern California. They named the settlement after John Greenleaf Whittier, a prominent Quaker poet, writer and abolitionist, who sent a dedicatory poem for the town, though he never visited it himself. That same year, the Southern Pacific Railroad built a spur to connect Whittier to the broader rail network, setting the stage for commercial growth.
In 1887, the Quaker founders also established what became Whittier College, originally chartered as Whittier Academy by the Religious Society of Friends and formally chartered by the State of California in 1901 with an initial student body of 25. The College remains on its founding campus and continues to embody core Quaker values: respect for the individual, community service, social justice and freedom of conscience. Whittier itself was incorporated as a city in 1898, and the College has grown to serve more than 1,400 undergraduate and graduate students.
Families in Whittier today, like those first Quaker settlers, are building something meant to endure: homes, educations, and paths through life that have room for the people who depend on them. A term life policy sized to match those years—when a mortgage is being paid, children are being raised, or a business is being built—protects the family's steady course if something happens to an income.