Lancaster, California

The person credited with formally developing the town is Moses Langley Wicks, who, in 1884, bought property from the railroad for $2.50 per acre, mapped out a town with streets and lots, and advertised 160-acre tracts of land for $6 an acre. By 1890, Lancaster was bustling and booming, and thanks to adequate rainfall, farmers planted and sold thousands of acres of wheat and barley. The town was devastated by the decade-long drought that began in 1894, killing businesses and driving cattle north, though fortunes improved somewhat in 1898, following the nearby discoveries of gold and borax, the latter to become a widespread industrial chemical and household cleaner. Thanks to the five-year construction of the 233-mile Los Angeles Aqueduct starting in 1908, Lancaster became a boom town by housing aqueduct workers. The community began a steady growth spurt in the 1930s, starting with construction of Muroc Air Force Base, site of frequent flight tests, including the “breaking” of the sound barrier by Chuck Yeager in a Bell X-1A in 1947. The development of Air Force Plant 42 in 1958, augmented in the 1960s by construction of Lockheed Aircraft’s Plant 10, created tens of thousands of jobs with high-wage employment hitting its peak in the 1970s. Lancaster was an unincorporated community in Los Angeles County until 1977, when it was incorporated as a city. Aerospace is still one of the area’s biggest industries, and Lancaster is now home to major defense contractors such as Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Virgin Galactic, BAE, and government agencies, such as the NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center, which are all active in design, testing, and manufacturing of a variety of military and commercial equipment. In addition to aerospace, highlights of Lancaster’s diversified economy include advanced transportation, health care, and manufacturing. Lancaster’s current population is approximately 170,000 and the city houses approximately 75 percent of workers from nearby Edwards Air Force Base. And, according to the city’s Assistant to the City Manager, Chenin Dow, the number of aerospace workers in the community is expected LANCASTER , CAL I FORNI A