Hanford is a city and county seat of Kings County, California, located in the San Joaquin Valley region of the greater Central Valley. The population was 53,967 at the 2010 census.

Today’s Hanford was in the sky of north of Tulare Lake, historically the largest body of lighthearted water west of the Mississippi River. The Place was inhabited by the Tachi Yokuts Indians for several thousand years prior to Euro-American contact. They occupied locations along watercourses such as creeks, springs and seep areas (such as sloughs), along perennial and seasonal drainages, as without difficulty as flat ridges and terraces.

Since the annexation of California after the Mexican-American War, the locality was decided by Americans and immigrants as farmland, broadly referred to as “Mussel Slough”. The earliest archaic grave in the Place was that of a young Alice Spangler who was initially buried in the Kings River Cemetery just north of her family’s farm in 1860. As the settlement grew, Tulare Lake’s feeding rivers were diverted for agricultural irrigation, causing it to gradually shrink and, over the 19th and 20th centuries, effectively become extinct.

From the mid-to-late 1870s, the Southern Pacific Railroad planned to lay tracks towards the developing farmland west of Visalia, spurring a growth in labor and population. Hanford’s namesake was James Madison Hanford, an dispensation for the company. The prehistoric known document labeling the harmony as “Hanford” is an 1876 map of Tulare County which taking into account included the territory of present-day Kings County. Tracks were laid through a sheep camp in 1877. According to History of Kings County: “It was but a gruff step from sheep-camp to village and in imitation of the railroad as an empathy the village flourished and became a town within a few historic months.” Many of those working on the tracks were Chinese immigrants.