Like many Valley towns, Delano owes its existence to the railroad. Today on KVPR’s Central Valley Roots, we dig into how the city got its name, and learn how a global financial crisis briefly made this city the end of the line.
The years after the Civil War saw a boom in railroad construction across the county. East coast banks, like Jay Cooke and Company, financed much of that construction. But as with many booms, there eventually came a bust. In May of 1873, the Vienna stock market crashed. Overnight, the European market for railroad bonds evaporated. Within months Jay Cooke and Company declared bankruptcy, setting off the Panic of 1873. Before 1929, THIS was known as the Great Depression.
While the Big 4 of the Central and Southern Pacific Railroads weren’t directly tied to Cooke and Company, the crisis had an immediate impact. As the collapse hit, construction was underway on the main line from Stockton to Bakersfield.
By July 1873 construction stopped, just south of the Tulare Kern County line, at a townsite that known as Meridian. The new town would serve as the southern terminus of the railroad for over a year, until the tracks reached the Bakersfield area in October 1874. But Meridian wasn’t the town’s final name.
Perhaps seeking to curry favor with a key Washington bureaucrat, the SP named the new townsite Delano, in honor of U.S. Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano. It may have been strategic as Delano’s department supervised the government land grants that were key to the railroad’s business. In 1875, Delano resigned in a scandal, where he allegedly accepted bribes for land grants involving his son.
