April 5, 2026
Hanford Insider: Community News/Sports and Kings County History Pt. 1
Send me a text and give me feedback on this episode! A city council agenda can tell you where a town is headed, and Hanford has some real signals this week. We walk through the upcoming meeting items, including Heroes Park funding, public hearings that affect neighborhood costs, and the possibility of bringing back a large Fourth of July fireworks show at the Hanford Softball Complex. We also talk about the new Main Street Hanford speaker system and why small downtown upgrades can change how ...
Send me a text and give me feedback on this episode!
A city council agenda can tell you where a town is headed, and Hanford has some real signals this week. We walk through the upcoming meeting items, including Heroes Park funding, public hearings that affect neighborhood costs, and the possibility of bringing back a large Fourth of July fireworks show at the Hanford Softball Complex. We also talk about the new Main Street Hanford speaker system and why small downtown upgrades can change how a community feels, then highlight a stacked local events calendar from the championship parade to Fill-the-Boot for the Muscular Dystrophy Association.
Then we take a sharp turn into Kings County history with our first look inside the Carnegie Museum of Kings County’s Building Kings County exhibit. Using recorded curator training, we follow the forces that built the region: the railroad boom after the Gold Rush, Southern Pacific’s monopoly power, and the land-grant system that shaped where tracks and towns appeared. We dig into the San Francisco and San Joaquin Valley Railroad push for competition, how it cut freight rates, and why the Mussel Slough conflict near Hardwick became a national story about land, promises, and power.
From there, the episode moves through the earlier roots that many locals have never heard: Kingston as a vital Kings River crossing, rare historic photos, and the larger story of how people and businesses migrated as Hanford rose. We also unpack the intense politics behind forming Kings County from western Tulare County, plus early Hanford fire maps that show how repeated blazes helped drive incorporation and modern infrastructure. We wrap up with a full Hanford area high school baseball and softball report, plus ways to support the podcast and keep local storytelling strong.
Subscribe for weekly Hanford news and Kings County history, share the episode with a friend, and leave a review to help more locals find the show. What piece of Hanford or Kings County history should we chase next?
You can find the Hanford Insider at www.hanfordinsider.com and on social media at @hanfordinsider
Thank you for supporting the show!
00:00 - Welcome And What’s Ahead
01:00 - City Council: Parks And Fireworks
02:32 - Downtown Speakers And Civic Park Egg Hunt
03:23 - Week’s Events And Newsletter Plug
04:39 - Building Kings County Exhibit Setup
05:17 - Railroads, Land Grants, And Monopoly Power
11:28 - Muscle Slough And Local Resistance
12:57 - Kingston Ferry And Early Settlers
16:34 - Grangeville And Stratford In Photos
18:11 - The Political Fight To Form Kings County
22:48 - Early Hanford Maps And The Big Fires
26:49 - Museum Hours, Next Week Preview
27:32 - High School Baseball And Softball Recap
31:18 - Support The Show And Closing
WEBVTT
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On this episode of The Hanford Insider, we get our first look into the Carnegie Museum's Building Kings County exhibit.
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Rob will give you a look at some of this week's community events, and I'll be back with your sports report.
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This is the Hanford Insider for Monday, April 6th.
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From hidden gems to hometown legends, we're bringing you closer to the heart of our community.
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I'm your host Rob Bentley, and this is where Hanford comes to life.
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So let's get started.
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In Community News This Week, the Hanford City Council will meet on Tuesday, April 7th.
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In the afternoon studies session at 4, they'll have an update and funding discussion for Heroes Park.
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During the regular meeting at 7 p.m., they'll have three public hearings, two on landscape assessment districts, and the other regarding a refuse rate increase.
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They'll also be looking at applying for another grant to help pay for the East Lacey Corridor Improvement Project.
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And they'll be receiving a presentation and a request for an appropriation from the general budget by the Department of Parks and Community Services for a 4th of July fireworks show at the Hanford Softball Complex.
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The complex provides ample and secure space, parking, concessions, restrooms, and a fireworks staging area.
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If approved, the event will include live music, food and drink vendors, games, a kids' fun zone, and VIP areas.
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Hanford hasn't had a public fireworks show in a few years, and it'll be nice to have a large-scale show again, and maybe, just maybe, it would help cut down on the number of illegal fireworks this year.
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If you remember, the City Council recently passed a change in the city ordinance that would allow for a$1,000 fine per illegal firework if you are caught in possession of them or lighting them off.
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I'll be sure to update everyone following Tuesday night's meeting on my social media accounts on the council's decision to sponsor a show or not.
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In other community news, if you've been downtown in the last few weeks, you may have noticed the new speaker system installed by Main Street Hanford.
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Other cities such as Viselia, Kingsburg, and Lamore have similar setups.
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This is just one more step in creating a welcoming, lively, and memorable destination for our community.
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The music sounds great, Main Street Hanford.
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Thanks for all that you do.
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Finally, the annual egg hunt at the Civic Park was awesome.
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Over 800 kids showed up with their parents for the fun, which included an egg hunt, vendor booths, games, Freddy the Firetruck rides, and carousel rides.
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And I have to say the park looks fantastic.
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And I'd like to give a shout out to all of the City of Hanford crews who do such a great job in renovating the park after Winter Wonderland.
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Now let's take a look at this week's community calendar.
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There'll be a parade in downtown Hanford on Thursday, April 9th, celebrating the Sierra Pacific Golden Bears Girls Basketball Team State Championship.
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The parade will begin at 7th and Harris by the cart station and end at the Hanford Civic Auditorium.
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The parade begins at 5 p.m.
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Hanford Firefighters will be out at the intersection of 12th and Mall Drive on Friday, April 10th for their annual fill-the-boot fundraiser for the Musker Dystrophy Association.
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Saturday, April 11th is sure a busy day.
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The Sierra Pacific Band is holding their shredding event.
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The annual Autism Awareness Run will be held at Quail Lake Park.
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Saturday is also the day for the Hanford Garden Club Garden Tour.
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And it's also Kids' Day at the Longfield Center.
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If you have an event coming up, large or small, and you'd like some help getting the word out, let's work together.
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Send your information to HanfordInsider at gmail.com.
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Be sure to subscribe to my weekly newsletter to get a complete calendar of events.
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It's the most comprehensive community calendar available.
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During my spring break, I took a little break from the show, but I still wanted to post an episode, so I thought it would be great to share some fascinating local history with you.
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As you may know, I am the president of the Carnegie Museum of Kings County, and our current exhibition is called Building Kings County.
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It opened in February.
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At Earneston Training, the curators took time to educate our volunteers on the exhibition.
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As part of the training, I recorded it, and the stories were so good I knew it would be a great fit for this episode.
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In this portion, curators Jack Schwartz and Michael Seamus share the origins of Kings County.
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If you studied anything about California history, you know from the Gold Rush through the 1900s, the Gold Rush was the impetus that got a couple hundred thousand people into California.
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But the railroads, and particularly the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific, which were, for all intents and purposes, one and the same, had a stranglehold on rail transportation.
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And one of their main lines was going from the Klinga area all the way to Goshen.
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And so what we have is thanks to Michael Seemus, we have pictures of all of the stations along that main line and a couple of the spur lines.
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And we have a little discussion of each of the stations.
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Now, what people don't realize is that two things.
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One, if you were here for Kings County Ag Part One, you learned about the King's Lakeshore Railroad, which was a tiny railroad that went corkering down about 18 miles to a farm.
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Their entire rolling stock was a boxcar, a locomotive, and a caboose.
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And so we've got that, and you can see it on the map.
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Now, one of the things that happened was the way that Southern Pacific worked, and all the other railroads in the Western United States in particular work, was they had Congress, in order to finance and take the risk of doing these capital-intensive rail lines, they had Congress authorize them to get section, every other section of land.
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Okay, section being a mile by a mile.
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And so they would route their their tracks along where they had the land.
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And what they would do is they would sell their lots, they would form a town, sell their lots to make their money.
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And they would always try and sell the land around their depots.
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Okay, that's how they made their money.
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And it was spectacularly successful for a few, in particular the Southern Pacific.
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So by the 1900s, between 1870 and 1900, the Southern Pacific had a monopoly, a stranglehole on rail traffic in California, and particularly here in the valley.
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And so what we have is we have some discussions going on, but what happened, particularly here in Kings County, was that several people got together and literally the residents of Kings County led the effort to have competition.
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And they went up to San Francisco to talk to the Astra-Sin-Sapeka Santa Fe folks and said, hey, why don't you bring a line down into the valley?
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Because we need the competition.
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They also went down to Los Angeles.
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And once they went to Los Angeles, the Santa Fe people in San Francisco said, oops, we better get going.
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And so they formed the San Francisco and San Joaquin Valley Railroad, which started construction around 1896 or so, 97, went from Stockton down to Bakersfield, went right through Hanford.
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Okay.
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And so that's a discussion you see with the San Francisco and San Joaquin Valley Railroad narrative that's up on top there.
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The fact is that that railroad is closely aligned to Santa Fe, and by around 1900, it became part of the Santa Fe Railroad.
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But the immediate result of that competition was that freight rates went down significantly.
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And um you probably all heard of Muscle Slough.
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The Muscle Slough tragedy happened out here near Hardwick.
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And what happened was, okay, as I said, Congress would give sections of land to railroads.
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Well, Southern Pacific went out and said to settlers, if you move on here and improve it, then we'll sell it to you cheap.
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Well, by the time the Southern Pacific got title to the land, because remember, they get a reservation, but they didn't have clear title until they started putting lines down.
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By the time they did that, all the settlers around here had improved the land, brought in water, built houses, agriculture.
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And so instead of like$250 an acre, Southern Pacific came in and said, uh, it'll be$25 an acre.
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And that caused a lot of consternation.
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And so in Grainville at uh the Grangeville Hall, which is over here, one of the places that the settlers met to organize against and complain about Southern Pacific.
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One day there was a community picnic gathering.
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And a U.S.
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Marshal and a Southern Pacific guy came down and started evicting people.
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And that led to the shootings.
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And it became a national cause celeb.
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And so we discussed that with the muscle slew strategy, and we have some of the post uh some of the advertisements, the cartoons, whatever you want to call them, from back in the day.
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And those are the courtesy of the Burris Park Museum.
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So we talk about muscle slew, we talk about the competition, and so that takes us really through around 1900 in terms of the railroads.
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Now, when the railroad went west from Hanford, they started going towards Armona and Lemore.
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Okay, we'll actually talk about that in the Lemoire thing, but what we have here is a diorama of what the train station looked like in Lemore at the turn of the century.
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And so that's kind of cool.
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What we decided to do is we wanted to talk about what was here before Kings County showed up.
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And surprisingly, there are a lot of people that don't know that before Hanford, before Lamore, before Grangeville, before Hardwick, before any town in this area existed, Kingston was here.
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And now today, Kingston is just a a placemark and a park that's closed by the county on the Kings County side of the Kings River.
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But at one time, that was the only community that was the only community between Fireball and Visaya.
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And so what we did was we went through and we searched high and low for photos of Kingston.
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Now you got to understand they are very rare.
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And surprisingly, the best collection of Kingston photos that we found was at the Kings County Library.
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I could not believe what they had.
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So I grabbed and scanned the best that they did.
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So you'll see over here, there's a series of five photos that show the progression of Kingston and the bridge and the ferry that crossed the river.
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What made Kingston was the fact that there was a there was a shallow place in the Kings River where people could cross back and forth.
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And so a gentleman by the name of Lucas Whitmore came there in 1852, built a boat, and tied it with rope across the river and pulled people back and forth across the river at that time.
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So you'll see up here, picture number one is an actual image of the boat that was used across the river there at Kingston between the Fresno County side and the Kings County side.
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The second picture is taken pre-1880, showing the community of Kingston with the town that existed at that time.
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The third one is pre-1873.
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Probably somebody really wants to get older, you don't think.
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They're still there.
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You've got to look for them, but they're still there.
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Even more importantly, is the fact that the Keynes County Library had pictures of some of the most important people of Kingston at that time.
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The top two pitchers were the uh they were Oliver Bliss and Caroline Bliss.
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They were the owners of the the ferry and the bridge until about 1882, 1883.
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The two middle pitchers that uh is the Dr.
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Davidson and his wife Nanny.
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He came, he had a life that you could not believe.
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He was born in Washington, D.C., ended up going to medical school in in England, enlisted in the British military, was fought in the Crimean War, came back to New Orleans, ended up fighting for the Confederate side of the Civil War, and then in 1865, he came here and established his medical practice.
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Later on, he moved to Hanford and ultimately sold his property to the county where they put the courthouse.
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So his house used to be where the courthouse is now.
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The other two gentlemen at the bottom, that's Louis Einstein, who owned the Jacob and Einstein store and Edward Erlinger, who was his bookkeeper.
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Uh man after my own heart.
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And so we have a little story about them, uh, very important uh people who established Kingston and uh everybody other than the Blisses, the everybody else ultimately moved to Hamford.
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So then we have over here we talk about Grangeville.
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Uh so you'll have these pictures were all taken, I think, in the late 30s or early 40s.
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Unfortunately, other than the church, everything else was gone.
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But the the most important building that I think shown here is the Grangeville Hall because that's where the settlers league met to battle the railroad that ultimately brought up to Muscle Slough.
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It was in that building.
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I don't know if that was the Grange building or not.
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It's called the Grange, Grangeville Hall.
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That's where everybody, that was where everybody met.
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It could have been the Grange.
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I don't know.
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Below that, we have some great pictures of Stratford.
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So we have this nice panoramic photo showing the thriving metropolis of Stratford back, I don't know, 1917, it says.
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And we have the railroad depot and the brothers' store.
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Below that, we have the grain wagons would come in from the Tillary Lake bottom loaded with grain, and they would load them into the rail cars to get out of the area here.
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This is an interesting photo because the man pictured there is William Stratton.
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He was the man that the town wanted to name the town after him.
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They wanted to call it Stratton, California.
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The post office turned him down because it was already a Stratton in the United States, so they went for Stratford.
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And the four pictures below that came from the Orton family showing the the way Stratford looked 110 years ago.
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So I mean, yeah, it was a really neat town.
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It's unfortunate that you know everything declines, but that's what it looked like.
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The next area that we have is a discussion of the birth of Kings County.
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Now, Kings County, the the battle to to make Kings County was rather boisterous, I should say.
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It took about six years between the time they initially petitioned the state to form a county until it actually became a county.
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In 1893, the citizens of Western Tularie County uh petitioned the state of California to form a separate county here.
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And you'll see that there's this map that has a couple colored lines.
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So the green section there was the supervisor district for which is most of Kings County, and you'll see a green line that comes down there in the middle.
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That's the Kings County that we see today.
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But the other two count, the other two, those were competing counties that were thrown into the legislature to stop Kings County.
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At the time, what was happening was that Eastern Tulare County did not want to lose the tax revenue of the Lucerne district, which was Hanford North.
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It was the best farmland in the area at the time.
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And so they fought tooth and nail to prevent Kings County from splitting off.
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And what they did was they created these two other counties.
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The red county was to be called Buena Vista County, and it would have made the city of Tulary as its county seat.
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And the blue line was Putnam County, in which Porterville would have been the county seat.
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And these were put into the legislature to kind of gum up the works for Kings County.
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But the the the amount of people that were supporting Kings County at the time allowed these other two counties to fail.
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And so I, you know, I was really surprised when I was doing that, realized that that there were that was that was uh basically they were trying to do dirty politics to stop Kings County from splitting off.
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We have here just the timeline for the formation.
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You can read what was going on.
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This is the newspaper from April or from May 30th, 1893, that shows the tally.
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Because what happens is that the the state says, okay, we'll let you form a county, but your citizens got to agree to it.
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And so they had to come back to this area and all the different communities you'll see right there at the top.
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You know, Hanford was 715 for and 10 against, but Lamore was 41 for and 130 against.
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Because Lamore did not want to be in the shadow of Hanford, they did not want Hanford to become the county seat.
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And if you'll know is if okay, so you want to know when you look down the eastern border there, why is there this little jog that goes out there?
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What is that?
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There is a rule within county law or within state law that says that a county seat can be no closer than so many miles to the border.
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And so what happened was that they had to go and move the border that mile to keep Hanford from to prevent or to keep Hanford to be the county seat.
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Otherwise, Lamore would have been the county seat.
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So that's that's the little jog there.
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So and anyway, it's just a couple newspaper articles.
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A couple other things here we have from the city of Hanford.
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They've loaned us the portraits of Mr.
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and Mrs.
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Hanford.
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Nice guy.
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Uh I did some research in Fresno about two years ago, and that little column there is out of the Lamor, that's out of the Visea Times Delta.
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That's the earliest known ad that I've ever found talking about buying a lot in the town of Hamford.
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So this is that ad came out.
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Before the town existed.
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And that just describes, you know, the it just the little advertisement.
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And then I forgot that I had this and we were talking about it.
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The map that's in green, uh, the the map that's in the glass that was the map used by the railroad to sell the lot.
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And I found that on eBay.
00:22:25.680 --> 00:22:33.279
There was a guy in Pacifica that collected maps, he died, and his kids just put the maps up on eBay for sale.
00:22:33.440 --> 00:22:37.759
And I'm telling you, it was a bid fest for all the different maps.
00:22:37.920 --> 00:22:39.759
And I was real happy to get that one.
00:22:40.240 --> 00:22:43.440
The Traver map went for a ton of money.
00:22:43.759 --> 00:22:46.720
And so just saying, I was real happy to find that.
00:22:46.880 --> 00:22:47.920
It's great to have here.
00:22:48.160 --> 00:22:50.799
That's the map that was used to sell the lots.
00:22:51.039 --> 00:22:52.960
So you'll see there's a little line.
00:22:53.039 --> 00:23:00.799
They they they drew a line and they wrote over here outside the blue line for$75, inside$60.
00:23:01.920 --> 00:23:06.000
So that that's well, that's a unique map.
00:23:06.079 --> 00:23:09.680
I mean, I never I never ever thought I would even find something like that.
00:23:10.000 --> 00:23:17.519
So the final section over here is early views of Hanford before 1900.
00:23:18.319 --> 00:23:20.799
And we have this nice map in the middle.
00:23:20.880 --> 00:23:28.480
This is a Sanborn, uh a replica of a Sanborn fire map from Hanford from January of 1885.
00:23:28.880 --> 00:23:36.000
So everything that appears on that map was burned in fires by 1890.
00:23:36.319 --> 00:23:38.000
I mean, it's it's really quite sad.
00:23:38.160 --> 00:23:43.039
So number one, that is the Lafayette House.
00:23:43.359 --> 00:23:50.400
The Lafayette House was a motel, a hotel that sat, you'll see it named on the map there above Dowdy Street.
00:23:50.480 --> 00:23:51.759
It says Lafayette H.
00:23:51.920 --> 00:23:52.240
O.
00:23:52.559 --> 00:23:54.240
And that was this building.
00:23:54.559 --> 00:23:59.519
And the fire of 1886 started there and burned the whole town down.
00:24:00.240 --> 00:24:19.599
And so, in fact, fire is is is really what created the city of Hanford altogether because there were so many fires and so much loss, nobody could get fire insurance unless the community incorporated and had the power to tax people to put in fire hydrants.
00:24:20.319 --> 00:24:24.880
Okay, so so you'll see there that's that was 1880.
00:24:24.960 --> 00:24:27.359
That the that's around 1880s.
00:24:27.519 --> 00:24:31.599
It doesn't this is the big fire of 1886 was built in 1876.
00:24:32.160 --> 00:24:37.119
Uh number two, that is looking west on 6th Street.
00:24:37.440 --> 00:24:42.240
The buildings down to the far left is where near where China Cafe is.
00:24:42.480 --> 00:24:45.279
I mean, I I mean uh Star Cafe.
00:24:45.920 --> 00:24:46.720
Star Cafe.
00:24:47.119 --> 00:24:48.559
That all burned.
00:24:48.960 --> 00:24:53.920
Number three, that's again looking west down front sixth street.
00:24:54.160 --> 00:24:56.720
Some of those buildings still stand today.
00:24:57.119 --> 00:25:02.880
Below that is a 4th of July parade, same view, lots of dust.
00:25:03.759 --> 00:25:10.000
Number five is Hamford from 1879, and that's looking 6th Street looking east.
00:25:10.720 --> 00:25:20.720
And a particular note, on the far right, there is a signage that says Charles Sharp and Company Machinery Depot.
00:25:20.799 --> 00:25:26.319
So if you know who the Sharp family is, they can point to this picture and say, We've been here since 1879.
00:25:27.440 --> 00:25:36.880
Below that is the popular bordello called the Lake House, which sat on the south side of the railroad.
00:25:36.960 --> 00:25:41.359
I don't know exactly where, we know it's on the south side of the railroad, and you'll see it there.
00:25:41.920 --> 00:25:52.160
This is a view looking east on 6th Street, back towards Visaya, and you'll look along there, you'll see all the grain warehouses that were here.
00:25:52.400 --> 00:26:01.119
Hanford, if it initially its biggest agricultural uh product was grain, and you'll see all the grain warehouses on the on that map.
00:26:01.279 --> 00:26:11.039
So, you know, this is a a good representation of very early Kings County, and there's a lot to read and a lot to discuss here.
00:26:11.119 --> 00:26:23.119
So Sixth Street initially was called Front Street now on the map it says 6th Street, but people said we're on front of the rail line.
00:26:23.200 --> 00:26:24.559
That's where they got the front street from.
00:26:24.640 --> 00:26:27.920
We're right in front of the rail, and so that's where Front Street came from.
00:26:28.079 --> 00:26:28.960
But it's 6th Street.
00:26:29.279 --> 00:26:30.640
Yes, they still have that in Armona.
00:26:30.799 --> 00:26:31.119
Exactly.
00:26:31.200 --> 00:26:38.880
In fact, you're gonna see as we go over here, there is a view looking uh uh looking west on Front Street along Armona.
00:26:39.119 --> 00:26:41.039
So so that's that's it.
00:26:41.200 --> 00:26:48.079
I mean, you know, I I think it's a great representation, lots of pictures people want to read, some some great readings.
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