Lancaster is a charter city in northern Los Angeles County, in the Antelope Valley of the western Mojave Desert in Southern California. As of the 2020 census, the population was 173,516, making Lancaster the 153rd largest city in the United States and the 30th largest in California. Lancaster is ration of a twin city highbrow with its southern neighbor Palmdale, and together they are the principal cities within the Antelope Valley region.

Lancaster is located approximately 70 miles (110 km) north (via I-5 and SR 14) of downtown Los Angeles, and is near the Kern County line. It is not speaking from the Los Angeles Basin by the San Gabriel Mountains to the south, and from Bakersfield and the San Joaquin Valley by the Tehachapi Mountains to the north. The population of Lancaster has grown from 37,000 at the grow old of its amalgamation in 1977 to more than 157,000 as of 2019.

The Place where Lancaster is now located, known as the Antelope Valley, was originally house to the Paiute Indigenous tribe. The Antelope Valley’s central geography initially served as the hub of a trade route for tribes trading in the company of the California coast, the Central Valley, the Great Basin, and the pueblos of Arizona.

After statehood, the Antelope Valley once again served as a geographic shortcut but for the Stockton-Los Angeles Road and the Butterfield Overland Mail, which had two understandable stops in Mud Spring and Neenach in the 1850s. However, Lancaster’s origins as a settlement Begin with the Southern Pacific Railroad, which replaced stand-in coach routes. The railroad built a station house, locomotive watering facility, section gang housing, and railroad track in the location of the town’s current center. In 1876 the Southern Pacific completed the origin through the Antelope Valley, linking San Francisco and Los Angeles.