Juan Bautista Castro, from an important California family, founded the town in 1863 by subdividing his rancho and becoming the first in the county to offer lots to attract settlers. Castroville, the county’s second oldest town after Monterey, grew slowly despite its railroad crossroads. Its earliest settlers came from New England, Ireland, China, and Portugal, and later from Japan, Italy, and Mexico. In the 1880s, the first Japanese arrivals were single men who replaced Chinese farm laborers after Chinese immigration was barred, and in 1907 wives joined them, forming a community made up mainly of tenant farmers. Italians brought the artichoke to the area in the 1920s. By 1935, about 25 Japanese families lived near Castroville, and the Issei raised funds and worked together to build a school that opened in 1936 for their children; because they were prohibited from owning land, the deed was placed in the name of the Nisei. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Executive Order #9066 allowed the military to exclude people from coastal areas, and Japanese-Americans in this region were held without trial at the Salinas Rodeo Grounds before the entire Japanese community was sent on July 4, 1942, to the Poston, Arizona prison camp. After the war, a few men used the school as a dormitory, and although some returning Japanese later found work in places such as Monterey or farmed again in the Salinas Valley, there was never another Japanese community in Castroville. In the 1970s and 1980s, Japanese-Americans pressed Congress to acknowledge the injustice of their incarceration, and in 1982 an investigating commission found that the imprisonment had been driven by hysteria and racism rather than any real threat, leading to a government apology and compensation. Today, most people living in and around Castroville are of Mexican descent, many working in nearby fields, and the schoolhouse is to serve again as a cultural enrichment center for children.