Of the major cities in our part of the Central Valley, one is older than the rest. The story of the founding of Visalia, today on KVPR’s Central Valley Roots.
The Yokuts have called Tulare County home for millennia. But the area where the Kaweah River exits the mountains and spreads out into different channels on the valley floor attracted some of the first Europeans to settle in the region. In 1850, a group set up the small settlement of Woodsville (not to be confused with present-day Woodville which is located near Porterville) seven miles east of present day Visalia in the area known as Four Creeks. Most of the settlers were killed later that year in a clash with the Kaweah tribe. When the state created Tulare County, it briefly made Woodsville the county seat.
Meanwhile, seven miles to the west, in 1851 Nathaniel Vise built a cabin near Mill Creek amid a great forest of ancient oaks. When a wagon train of settlers from Iowa arrived the following year, Vise encouraged them to make the area their home. In 1852 they built a stockade of oak logs at what is today at the corner of Oak and Bridge Streets, known as Fort Visalia. This makes Visalia the oldest of the major cities of the San Joaquin Valley south of the delta.
There are different claims about who laid out the town. One version of the story says it was Vise. Another claims it was Thomas Baker, who would later go on to found Bakersfield. The town took its name from Vise and his family’s hometown of Visalia, Kentucky, a small hamlet south of Cincinnati.
Tulare County took over the Visalia townsite in 1853 and made it the new county seat, but renamed the town Buena Vista. Residents objected and the name went back to Visalia, and it’s been that way ever since. In 2023, Self Help Enterprises built a new housing development on the site of the old fort including historical markers and a small history room dedicated to the site of the city’s founding. Before construction began, crews used ground-penetrating radar to survey the site and search for remnants of the old log fort.
