Biohazard and Crime Scene Remediation in Lindsay, CA

Lindsay is a small city in Tulare County at the base of the Sierra Nevada foothills on the eastern edge of the San Joaquin Valley, surrounded by citrus and olive orchards.

The town was founded in 1889 by Captain Arthur J. Hutchinson, who bought 2,000 acres, formed the Lindsay Land Company and laid out the townsite as the Southern Pacific Railroad arrived, naming the community for his wife, Sadie Lindsay Patton Hutchinson.

Lindsay was incorporated on February 28, 1910, as a general law city, and its early growth followed the pattern of 5-to-10-acre citrus and olive small farms that is still visible on the fringe of the city today.

Olives and citrus have always been Lindsay's economic backbone, with local packing houses harvesting, processing and shipping olives, oranges and citrus juice, supported by the Lindsay-Strathmore Irrigation District.

In December 1990 a rare hard freeze destroyed the citrus crop on the trees virtually overnight, putting an estimated 57 percent of Lindsay's population out of work, and in 1992 two major employers, Lindsay Olive Growers and General Cable, closed with the loss of 640 jobs.

Downtown Lindsay is home to the McDermont Field House, a former McDermont Fruit Company orange packinghouse converted into an indoor sports and entertainment complex of roughly 172,000 square feet with basketball courts, an indoor soccer field, a climbing wall, laser tag and an indoor surf machine; it held its grand opening on June 21, 2008.

Each April Lindsay celebrates its citrus heritage with the Orange Blossom Festival, which draws more than 6,000 visitors for a parade, art competition and food vendors.

Explorer John C. Fremont passed through the future Lindsay area twice on the old Stockton-Los Angeles Road and Butterfield Overland Mail route, and the Yandanche tribe had hunted and fished at the site for centuries before that.

The 2020 census counted 12,659 people in Lindsay, up from 11,768 in 2010, packed into just 2.6 square miles of city.

Lindsay has about 3,630 households, and they are big ones, averaging 3.46 people per household, well above the national norm.