Old Town Road: a picturesque lane from an earlier century

Jon Hammond.

Though new homes continue to appear here and there, Old Town Road is one area of Tehachapi that hasn't changed much over the years.

One of my favorite roads in the Tehachapi area is also one of the oldest, a curving, undulating belt of pavement that meanders over foothills on the western end of the valley and is known as Old Town Road.

The original purpose of this venerable roadway is suggested by its name, and in fact it once served to connect a string of ranches, farms and homesteads with the first little town center of Tehachapi.

Only it wasn't known as "Tehachapi" at first. The initial cluster of settlers' buildings in the Tehachapi Valley was sometimes known as "Williamsburg" after James E. Williams, the man who originally laid out the townsite and sold lots to others. Few people seemed to have embraced the name Williamsburg, however, and even Williams himself often referred to the rough-sawn village as "Tehichipa" or "Tehachipa."

This settlement was located in a naturally-sheltered, alluvial pocket of flat land near Brite Creek. Today this property is bordered by the Mourning Cloak Ranch, the Kern County Sheriff's Department substation and Old Town Stables.

The first people to settle in a new area get the first choice of properties, and it's easy to see why the area served by Old Town Road was popular. Over the millennia as Brite Creek flowed its way down toward Tehachapi Canyon, it had carved out a narrow band of lower-lying ground with rich deposited soil on each side of the little creek, a kind of ribbon valley tucked within the large Tehachapi Valley.

It was in this pleasant location that settlers first began to establish homes in the Tehachapi Valley, as had the Nuwä (Kawaiisu or Southern Paiute) Indian people who preceded them: there were at least three sizeable Indian village sites along Brite Creek.

And so in the 1860s, Old Town Road came into being, winding its way among the homesteads and leading to the little Tehachipa townsite. The State of California itself was less than 20 years old at the time.

Old Town Road is not an engineered, carefully planned and surveyed roadway. No, it dips and bends, draped over the small hills like a rope tossed on a cluster of pumpkins. It follows the same general course as Brite Creek, the seasonal waterway whose presence is indicated by a fringe of Red and Arroyo Willows and an occasional Fremont Cottonwood.

Wagons carrying supplies, lumber, firewood and farm products once creaked their way slowly over Old Town Road, while buggies moving people rattled along at a faster clip. Occasionally heavy rains or melting snow would flood the banks of the normally placid Brite Creek and Old Town Road would wash out or be rendered impassable.

Brite Creek is usually slow-moving and calm, or even dry during drought years, but it can rage during and immediately after storms. It has washed out Old Town Road many times over the years. Brite Creek floodwaters once claimed the life of a young son of Thomas Hungerford, who in the 1860s first settled the property that in 1973 became the Mourning Cloak Ranch.

Horsedrawn traffic continued to be prevalent on Old Town Road well into the new century, and cars didn't outnumber horses on this three-mile stretch of road until the 1920s. The road itself wasn't paved until the 1930s and early 1940s.

Jon Hammond.

Willows to the left and an oak on the right, Old Town Road yields to the landscape that borders it.

When the Southern Pacific Railroad depot was established in its current location in the Tehachapi Valley in 1876, the community of Tehachipa began to coalesce in that location, and the railroad changed the spelling to the current Tehachapi by transposing the "a" and the "i."

The earlier townsite became Old Town, and then no town. Some buildings, like the home that later became known as the Errea House, were moved into the new town or dismantled, and the land became farmland. The Old Town schoolhouse remained standing but abandoned and unused for many decades, and Ed Sampson of the Mourning Cloak Ranch used some of the old lumber to build a bathroom for visitors to the botanical garden.

But the road remains and keeps the memory of the small townsite alive in its name, and Old Town Road's quaint design and unhurried pace suggest the older era in which it was born.

Old Town Road is framed by Woodford-Tehachapi Road to the north and Highway 202 at the south, and connects to Jeffery Road and Mariposa Drive. Over its entire course, about 120 homes are located adjacent to or near the road, some overlooking the roadway below while others are down closer to the creek. Some houses are out of view entirely, sheltered by their own small hills or slopes.

Shaded by oaks and nestled comfortably into the Tehachapi foothills, Old Town Road is both a picturesque relic from the past, and an enduring and pleasant drive today.

Keep enjoying the beauty of life in the Tehachapi Mountains.

Jon Hammond is a fourth generation Kern County resident who has photographed and written about the Tehachapi Mountains for 38 years. He lives on a farm his family started in 1921, and is a speaker of Nuwä, the Tehachapi Indian language. He can be reached at [email protected]/.