Lima beans were here
 Lima beans â either love them or hate them, but in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Carpinteria definitely had a mad love affair with the Lima bean. The first commercial planting of Lima beans and their development as a favorite (or vilified) North American food began in Carpinteria. Little known in this country before 1865, the Lima bean is actually a native of Guatemala, from where it had been carried to South America and widely planted as a food staple for millennia. In the late1860s, Robert McAlister, tired of working the northern gold mines, settled on farming in Car...
Source: coastalview.com