From Crumville to Ridgecrest
Near Ridgecrest, California
The city around you began as a wide spot of dairy farms in the high desert, settled around nineteen twelve and known back then as Crumville, after the Crum family who ranched here. It was a hard, dusty living, with little to promise a future. That changed with the coming of the first post office in nineteen forty-one, when residents chose a new and grander name.
According to local lore, the winning name Ridgecrest narrowly beat out other suggestions like Sierra View and Gilmore. But the town's real fortune arrived in nineteen forty-three, when the Navy established its Naval Ordnance Test Station, the base we now call China Lake. Almost overnight, a struggling farm settlement became a company town for one of the most advanced weapons laboratories on Earth.
Engineers and sailors poured in. Ridgecrest incorporated as a city in nineteen sixty-three, and today it is home to roughly twenty eight thousand people, sitting at about twenty three hundred feet of elevation in the Indian Wells Valley. Its fate is still bound tightly to the base.
When the Navy thrives, so does Ridgecrest, out here at the edge of the Mojave.
