The town is named after a printing error
Residents chose the name Monteca. The railroad misprinted it as Manteca, and the misspelling stuck. Manteca is Spanish for lard. I moved here partly because the name looked pretty on a map, so I have a particular soft spot for the fact that it is a typo for a word about pig fat. It is, in its way, the most Manteca thing about Manteca.
What actually made the town was sugar. Farmers petitioned for a plant on March 17, 1916. Manteca offered Spreckels 449 acres below market to land it, and the $2 million factory opened in 1918 with 400 men on the payroll by that July. For most of a century the town and the plant were the same story. It closed on January 9, 1996 with 230 workers still inside. Two years later the silos were imploded in front of 10,000 onlookers, and the whole thing took ten seconds.
Then Manteca did something I have always admired: it kept the bricks. The 362-acre Spreckels Park now covers the factory site, and its history park holds four pseudo-silos built from oversized culvert pipe on a brick base salvaged from the original plant. You can still find Spreckels warehouse bricks at the business park entrance and on the front of the old Kelley Brothers Brewing building downtown. Curran Grove put 177 homes on a former Spreckels almond orchard at Powers and East Yosemite, and the street signs there trace the Spreckels history. Powers Avenue runs through the Powers Tract, the city's first annexation, between Spreckels Park and Manteca High.
The first school opened in 1857 as East Union and burned down in 1913. The town has since produced an NBA head coach in Scott Brooks, a Medal of Honor recipient in Sammy L. Davis, and a big-league pitcher in Milo Candini, who has a street named for him running past the ballfields.