City of Modesto history

Modesto, city, seat (1871) of Stanislaus county, central California, United States It is situated on the Tuolumne River in the northern San Joaquin Valley, 94 miles (151 km) southeast of San Francisco.

The City of Modesto was incorporated on August 6, 1884.

Electric lights illuminated Modesto for the first time in early 1891.

"The city’s first sewer system was built in 1892, with a main on 9th Street draining laterals into the Tuolumne River.

More than 4,000 square miles (10,500 square km) of the desert lie below sea level, including the 300-square-mile (800-square-km) Salton Sea, a lake with no outlet that was created in 1905–07 when the nearby Colorado River broke out of its channel.

In the east-central region is the Trans-Sierra desert, which extends along the sheer east escarpment of the Sierra Nevada range and comprises part of the vast interstate Great Basin of the Basin and Range Province. Its largest towns are in the Owens Valley, which was a fertile farmland until its groundwater flow was diverted to Los Angeles through a mammoth series of conduits built in 1908–13.

While it was not the first municipal airport built, Modesto was the first city in the country to plan for an airport in its 1910 charter.

Just this month, Barzan found in the July 29, 1913, edition of the Modesto Evening News that a solar water heating system was installed on the roof of a building at 10th and J streets downtown. “The device was called the Night and Day Solar Water Heater,” he said.

Like getting to see in the state document archives the original blueprints for the depot erected in 1915 in downtown Modesto by the Southern Pacific Railroad.

In 1920, the first air freight delivery of auto parts, flown from San Francisco to Modesto, made national news.

And in an electricians journal from 1925, he found an article on the Beaty Building at 11th and J being the first electrically heated building in the state.

In 1936, Sciabica’s California Olive Oil began doing business, and now is the oldest producer in the country.

Modesto is home to Modesto Junior College and is near the Stanislaus campus built in 1957.

The California State Water Project, launched in 1960, is the largest water-transfer system ever undertaken.

But what Barzan said he’s found casts doubt on the intent in giving Modesto its name. “There’s a little bit of a mention of the issue in a book that came out in 1970 for Modesto’s centennial that there were problems with the story,” he said.

The last, which was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1978, rises from the purplish foothills of the Mother Lode Country and extends through the ice-carved valleys of the Merced and Tuolumne rivers.

With a population of approximately 201,165 at the 2010 census, it is the state of California’s 18th largest city and forms part of the combined statistical area of Modesto-Merced.

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