24/7 Biohazard and Crime Scene Cleanup in Corcoran, CA

Corcoran was founded by Hobart Johnstone Whitley, a Southern California land developer who visited the area in 1905, bought 32,000 acres and set out to build a town.

Whitley first intended to name the town 'Otis,' after Los Angeles Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis, and Corcoran's main street is still named Whitley Avenue in the founder's honor.

Corcoran was incorporated in August 1914.

Corcoran stands on the bed of Tulare Lake, once the largest lake west of the Mississippi River, which was drained and converted to farmland generations ago.

In the spring of 2023, after an exceptionally wet winter, Tulare Lake re-emerged and its floodwaters pressed against the 14-mile levee that rings Corcoran.

Corcoran is literally sinking: groundwater pumping for agriculture has dropped the ground as much as 11.5 feet in places over about 14 years, in a subsidence zone scientists call the 'Corcoran Bowl.'

The sinking forced Corcoran to rebuild its levee at a cost of about $10 million, paid for partly through higher local property taxes.

California State Prison, Corcoran opened in February 1988, and a second facility, the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison, stands just south of it - the two prisons house thousands of inmates who are counted in the city's census population.

Corcoran is the hometown of the J.G. Boswell Company, founded there in 1921 and grown from a regional operation into an international farming corporation growing Pima cotton, alfalfa, tomatoes, onions and wheat.

During the great San Joaquin Valley cotton strike of 1933, some 3,500 striking farm workers camped on four acres at the edge of Corcoran.