Biohazard Cleanup Near South Isleton Isleton, CA

Isleton is an incorporated city on Andrus Island in Sacramento County, founded in 1874 by Josiah Pool, who platted the town and built a wharf on the Sacramento River, and it incorporated in 1923.

Isleton is the smallest city in Sacramento County and sits in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta on State Route 160, which crosses the river on the 1923 Isleton Bridge.

The Delta town flooded repeatedly, in 1878, 1881, 1890, 1907, and 1972, and its founder Josiah Pool left after the early floods ruined him financially.

Chinese immigrants began arriving in Isleton around 1875 and numbered about 880 by 1880, Japanese laborers followed, and both the Chinese district on west Main Street and the Japanese district are listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Isleton became a Delta canning center famous for Bartlett pears and asparagus and was known as the "Asparagus Capital of the World" until its last cannery closed in 1966; it was also nicknamed the "Little Paris of the Delta."

Isleton's population peaked at 2,090 in the 1930 census, and the 2020 census counted 794 residents in 311 households with an average household size of 2.55 people.

Actor Pat Morita, famous as Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid, was born in Isleton in 1932.

Isleton's Crawdad Festival ran from the mid-1980s to the late 2000s and returned on June 17-18, 2023 after a 14-year absence, drawing an estimated 60,000 visitors over two days.

The Hotel del Rio, built in Isleton in 1949, contains one of California's legal card rooms and was at the center of the 1956 gambling and community-property court case Novo v. Hotel del Rio, which Erle Stanley Gardner later used in a Perry Mason novel.

The city lost its own police department in 2012, one of several blows to the small Delta community during and after the Great Recession.