L.P. Webber

History of L.P. Webber School

L.P. Webber School is named after Reverend Lemuel Peterson Webber, a Presbyterian minister who founded the Westminster Colony. Born in Salem County, New Jersey to a large Presbyterian family in 1832, Webber became a minister and first traveled to the West Coast in the 1860s, eventually making his way to Anaheim, California by 1869 where he purchased 6,000 acres southwest of Anaheim in an area covered in grassland and swamps. This was to be the future city of Westminster. 

The town was centered around Olive Street and Westminster Boulevard which included general stores, a pharmacy, and local blacksmith shops. Because the Presbyterians also valued education, the colony quickly established the Westminster School District in 1872, with its first school built near Sigler Park.  

In late 1954, Westminster School District had acquired the future sites of Webber School and the District Office. In 1957, Westminster was incorporated as a city. Alongside Finley and Schmitt, Webber was one of the first schools opened around the city’s incorporation and set a trend where Westminster schools were built from red brick, reminiscent to old schoolhouses. It is appropriate that the school should be so close to the old town center and the site of the old Westminster School built in 1872.

Webber was officially dedicated on March 4, 1957, three weeks prior to the city incorporation, with the first principal being Mrs. Marie Loveland. With this new school, class sizes at 17^th Street school could be reduced and the dilapidated Hoover School was abandoned for the city of Westminster to use as its first city hall.

Webber school would take students from the area across from Hoover Street as well as from the neighborhood near the District Office. One of Webber’s early PTA presidents, Mrs. Marion Aguirre, became WSD’s first board member of Mexican descent. An influx of Vietnamese refugees added to the school’s enrollment in the aftermath of the fall of the city of Saigon. Since then, Westminster’s demographics have changed, and the new residents and the youth brought their culture with them to Webber and other WSD schools.