Tehachapi

Tah-ee-chay-pah Creek and the Brites

Tehachapi, in Kern County, stands by the pass that became the preferred route between the Mojave and the San Joaquin Valley after John C. Fremont and Kit Carson came through in 1844.⁴ The Kawaiisu had a winter village nearby, Tomo-Kahni, where bedrock mortars, milling slicks, and rock art panels remain; it became a state historic park in 1993.⁵ In 1853 Lt. R.S. Williamson, surveying for the U.S. Government, learned from Indian villagers that they called the principal creek flowing west through the pass Tah-ee-chay-pah.⁴

The Early Settlers marker names John and Amanda Brite, who came from Texas in 1854 and built a mission style log cabin, as the first permanent settlers in the Tehachapi area.³ The 1939 Federal Writers’ Project guide tells it another way: gold in the China Hill placers in 1854 drew the first settlers to a Tehachapi then 3 miles east.⁶ George Cumming, Francois Chanac, Grant Price Cuddeback, and other families soon arrived and settled Brite Valley, Bear Valley, and Cummings Valley, where they raised cattle and grain.³

Old Town and Williamsburg

The state landmark calls ‘Old Town,’ established in the 1860s, the oldest settlement in Tehachapi Valley, and long an important station on the road between Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley.¹ James E. Williams came to the Tehachapi Valley in 1867, and by 1869 he had claimed a large parcel and laid out a town site he called Williamsburg, with a hotel and a blacksmith.³ Known also as Tehichipa, Williamsburg had a Bullion Street and a Main Street, and by May 1876 three doctors practiced there.^3,4 Louisa Jewett taught at its tax-supported public school, the third public school teacher in Kern County.³ Her son, Arthur Crites, wrote that every man carried his six-shooter and that into the latter part of the 19th century Kern County knew the area as “that rough place.”³ Gold bullion from the Cerro Gordo Mine in the Owens Valley was hauled to San Pedro for shipment until 1872, when it was found quicker to haul it through Tehichipa to the railhead at Caliente.³

The Loop and the Move to Greenwich

The Southern Pacific Railroad reached the Tehachapi Valley on July 10, 1876, the same year it finished the Loop under its engineer William Hood. On the Loop a 4,000-foot train crosses 77 feet above its rear cars in the tunnel below.^4,7,8 After the line was finished, residents of Old Town gradually moved to nearby Greenwich, later renamed Tehachapi, and the old community declined.¹ The 1939 guide put it that in 1876, when the railroad passed Tehachapi by, the town, “Mohammedlike, went to the railroad.”⁶ A depot built in 1904 to replace one lost to fire served the town as a station until 1971.⁹ The 2010 E Clampus Vitus marker dates the new town beside the line to August 13, 1909, and says it was incorporated as the City of Tehachapi.⁴

Fruit, Lime, Cement, and Wind

In 1939 the Federal Writers’ Project guide counted 736 people and described Tehachapi as the business and social center of a surrounding fruit area.⁶ Lime came early: by 1877 a kiln in Antelope Canyon was producing 400 to 500 barrels, and from the mid-1880s until 1929 a San Francisco corporation ran a small company town there.¹⁰ In January 1909 the City of Los Angeles began making cement near White Rock Creek for its aqueduct from the Owens Valley, at a plant renamed Monolith Portland Cement Company in 1921.¹⁰ The company town of Monolith, with its railroad depot, store, post office, school, and café, is gone, but as of 2015 Lehigh SouthWest Cement Company still made cement at the plant.¹⁰ In 1955 the California Portland Cement Company built its plant twenty miles southeast of Tehachapi.¹⁰

Before 1979 only a few water-pumping windmills stood on the farmland and ridgelines of the pass; in 1980 Zond Corporation was founded in Tehachapi to tap its wind, and dozens of companies followed.¹¹ The early crews tried rotors of 1 to 5 blades, vertical-axis “eggbeater” machines, and fabric-covered “sails.”¹¹

The Depot, the Library, and the Old Town Marker

The 1904 depot was nearly restored when fire destroyed it on June 13, 2008, and the depot standing now is a replica built to modern codes.⁹ The Tehachapi Museum occupies an Art Deco building put up in 1931 for the Kern County Library, where the Tehachapi Heritage League moved the museum in 1982.¹² A marker set in 1958 stands at the northeast corner of Old Town Road and Woodford-Tehachapi Road, 2.5 miles west of Tehachapi, where Old Town was established during the 1860s.^1,2