Oakhurst: The Town That Renamed Itself
Near Oakhurst, California
Oakhurst sits at the foot of the Sierra Nevada, at roughly twenty three hundred feet in elevation, where the oak-covered foothills give way to ponderosa pine and the mountains begin to climb in earnest. It is the last town of any size before Highway Forty One enters the Sierra National Forest and rises toward Yosemite's southern entrance. The town's origins are tangled up with gold, lumber, horses, and a postal dispute.
The first non-Native settlement here was called Fresno Flats, a name that told you everything about the geography: a level clearing at the edge of the mountains, in what was then part of Fresno County. Gold prospectors came through in the eighteen fifties, and a small community grew around a store and a post office in the foothills. By the eighteen seventies the town had a school, a church, and enough people to consider itself a going concern.
It was still called Fresno Flats. The name change to Oakhurst came in nineteen twelve, and the story behind it involves a woman, a stagecoach robbery, and a secret petition to Congress. According to local tradition, a woman named Kitty Meyers was embarrassed when a robbery of the Fresno Flats stage was reported in newspapers as far away as the East Coast.
She felt the name Fresno Flats sounded undignified, too flat and too dusty for a town with real aspirations. She gathered signatures from local residents on a petition for a new name and submitted it to the United States Congress without telling most of the town what she was doing. Congress approved it, and Fresno Flats officially became Oakhurst, named for the surrounding oak trees on a ridge above town.
Today Oakhurst functions as the primary gateway community for Yosemite's south entrance, the last place to buy groceries, fill your gas tank, or find a motel before the road climbs into serious mountains. It is also a community with its own deep history, one that reaches back through the lumber era, the stagecoach era, and beyond to the thousands of years when these foothills belonged entirely to the Chukchansi Yokuts.
