Up Above: The Geography of Suburban Sprawl in Southern California’s Antelope Valley

Matt Jalbert

Americans, Alfalfa, and the Antelope Valley

LIKE COUNTLESS OTHER TOWNS IN THE WESTERN UNITED STATES, the coming of the railroad made possible the Antelope Valley’s initial settlement by Anglo-Americans. In 1876, Southern Pacific laid the tracks of its San Francisco-to-Los Angeles “Valley” route. Entrepreneurs platted the town of Lancaster in 1884, aligning the parent grid to the railroad tracks rather than the U.S. survey lines. With artesian wells brought into production the same year, Lancaster was a logical place to establish a watering stop and railroad town. And almost immediately, the great industry of boosterism was set in motion.

“To the farmer who is poor in pocket, but rich in energy, this section presents many opportunities,” [note #8] trumpeted the editors of the 1889 Lancaster Gazette—and in the same breath carefully assuring readers (and potential investors) that the Antelope Valley did not lie “on or in the Mojave Desert.” (The booster tactic of proclaiming of the Antelope Valley as anything but parched California desert continues to this day.) Like many western railroad towns, the Antelope Valley was heavily promoted by land speculators as a place to where a man and his family could move and establish themselves in agriculture. The railroad provided farmers with vital access to the markets of urban San Francisco and the small nearby burg of Los Angeles.

The Valley’s second largest community, Palmdale, was established soon after Lancaster, its plat aligned to the U.S. rural grid rather than the railroad’s 7° off-north direction. With these settlements in place, the Valley bloomed as an agricultural community. In the decade and a half preceding 1893, settlers poured in. The 1887 Wright Irrigation Act hastened the formation of irrigation districts and agricultural colonies. Alfalfa, a water-intensive crop irrigated with with artesian well-water, quickly became the staple cash crop for farmers. They also cultivated dry-land wheat, barley, oats and other cereals, and planted the slightly higher southern edge of the valley in deciduous fruits such as pears, almonds, olives, prunes. Land values in the Valley’s southern portions skyrocketed as these fruit trees came into production. [note #9]

Across the Valley, farmers optimistically toughed it out against meager rainfall, alkaline soils, desiccating desert winds—and rabbits. Thousands of them. Rabbits were a serious problem to early Antelope Valley farmers, whose activities utterly disrupted the rabbits’ natural foraging areas. Whole orchards of saplings were destroyed when rabbits nibbled the bark off their trunks. In response,

Hunters killed off the ubiquitous jackrabbits. Great roundups of the latter were staged, for the animal was so clever at concealment that a single man would find it impossible to exterminate them working alone. So hundreds of men would come from Los Angeles deeming it great sport to form a wide circle and gradually hem in the animals until they were beaten to death with clubs. Hard on the rabbits, but necessary if crops were to grow. [note #10]

Above: A “rabbit drive” in the Antelope Valley, circa 1910. A major town event, hundreds of citizens would form a wide line across the desert and walk toward a fenced-in area, driving the rabbits ahead of them. Once in the pen, dozens of men would club the animals to death, if they didn't die of their own terror or suffocation. Frank Norris describes a rabbit drive in his early 20th century classic, The Octopus.

The first of the many economic slumps which the Antelope Valley was to know occurred in 1893. In that year, just as real estate speculators swindled investors and hopeful yeoman farmers by selling Antelope Valley land at the Chicago World’s Exposition, rainfall drastically decreased. While swindlers were showing photos “of vast grain fields with grain as high as a man’s shoulders by having a man on horseback stand in an irrigation ditch,” [note #11] crops were dying in the fields for lack of water. Overtapped wells stopped producing artesianally and farmers without power pumps lost their irrigation water. Through the end of the decade, many settlers abandoned their fields and fled the Antelope Valley. Thousands of acres of deciduous fruit trees died off (some two-thirds of the Valley’s orchards [note #12]), depressing land values and destroying the Valley’s economy.

The turn of the century saw, along with increased precipitation, a return of investment to the Antelope Valley. Boosterism resumed in earnest, backed by the full force of Southern Pacific’s Sunset Magazine. In 1913, the Lancaster Chamber of Commerce ran six months of advertisements in that strong arm of real estate promotion, selling agricultural lands in the Valley (figs. 1–5). Exploratory oil wells were drilled throughout the region, though with none of the luck oilmen had in the nearby San Joaquin Valley. The first Los Angeles aqueduct, finished in 1913, propped up the area’s economy considerably when construction crews used Lancaster as a staging area. Promotional pamphlets published by everyone from the Palmdale Fruitland Company to Sunset Magazine’s Homeseekers Bureau to the Antelope Valley Union High School appeared in the years surrounding World War I. They touted the return of good crops, good water, and the good life of a farmer in this high desert edge of Los Angeles County.

Just as the automobile began to tie places together in a new way in Los Angeles, the first paved auto roads were established to the Antelope Valley from down below. Mint Canyon Road, traversing through Soledad Pass and finished by 1920, brought Los Angeles “within 2 1/2 to 3 hours by automobile.” [note #13] Later, the surly mountains that separated the Antelope Valley from the booming metropolis of Los Angeles were blasted to make way for Angeles Forest Highway in the 1930s. These roads were vital links to the growing markets down below (although the area was still decades away from the freeway that would solidify the Antelope Valley’s economic relation to the Los Angeles basin). Farmers shipped alfalfa to dairy farms in the Riverside area, and sent fresh milk from the Valley’s own fledgling dairy industry to Los Angeles. Bartlett pears grown in the Antelope Valley became nationally famous, and a host of cereal grains, deciduous fruits, nuts, berries, cattle, and poultry were farmed or tended. In the 1930s, the Antelope Valley Ledger-Gazette proclaimed that “the 500,000 acres which go to make this great section may someday become the principle source of food supply for the huge metropolitan area on the other side of the San Gabriel Mountains.” [note #14]

Above: LLano Del Rio ruins, Antelope Valley, California, along Highway 138.

Besides the agricultural communities the region hosted, an eclectic array of communal settlements were established in the Antelope Valley in the years before the Depression. A 1936 map shows that no fewer than ten colonies had once existed in the sweep of the Valley. [note #15] The most famous of these was recently brought to new light in Mike Davis’s City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. Long known to ghost town enthusiasts and published about extensively in numerous books, the Llano del Rio Cooperative Colony was a short-lived socialist colony established by former Los Angeles mayoral candidate Job Harriman. [note #16] Building on the irrigation works of an earlier colony of temperance advocates, the Llano colony opened on May Day 1913, some 17 miles east of the Southern Pacific tracks where Big Rock Creek fans out on the desert floor. Internal dissension, external harassment, and an uncooperative Big Rock Creek doomed the colony, though, and in 1918 the colonists abandoned Llano del Rio. The arroyo-stone walls and columns of its larger buildings still stand alongside Pearblossom Highway at 165th Street East, littered with trash from communities that have since grown up in the surrounding desert. Despite this ignoble end, the optimism which infused the colony’s founding would prove to be an indefatigable trait of Antelope Valley settlers.

NEXT | From Farms to Bombs: The Air Force Discovers the Antelope Valley

© Matt Jalbert 1995–2002