If you drive by Broadway and Country Club roads in Mesa you have likely seen this faded Sunkist logo on an old brick building.

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"It doesn't take long; it's changed so fast," state historian Marshall Trimble said, talking about the change in a growing city.

These days, a small team from Autoline Industries manufactures custom auto parts in the Sunkist building that was a major hub for everything citrus in Mesa and the state.

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“There would have been huge tables; crates. You'd have packers in here, packing the oranges in here,” Trimble said of the old days in the packing facility.

At one point in the 1990s, more than 1 million crates a year were moving out of here, making Mesa one of the citrus-packing epicenters in the nation next to Florida and California.

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Trimble says 50 years ago, you couldn't avoid citrus orchards in Mesa.

"This whole place was citrus groves, way down there, way out there, everywhere you looked it was citrus groves," Trimble said.

Our weather lack of hard freezes made the Valley an ideal place to grow oranges, grapefruit and lemons.

But something that grew even faster ended up bringing the industry to a halt.

“One thing caused it to drop off,” Trimble said. “One thing and one thing only. Urbanization"

Homes took the place of the orchards. But in the basement of the old Sunkist packing plant and around Mesa, there are still memories of its rich citrus past.

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