Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Services in Oakhurst, CA

Oakhurst is an unincorporated census-designated place in Madera County, in the Sierra Nevada foothills about 14 miles south of the southern entrance to Yosemite National Park.

Oakhurst serves as the southern gateway community for visitors traveling to Yosemite National Park on Highway 41.

The town began in 1858 as Fresno Flats, when rancher John Robert Nichols became the first permanent Anglo settler in the area.

Its original name combined 'fresno,' the Spanish word for the ash trees that grew there, with 'flats,' a term for a mountain meadow.

The first school in what is now Madera County opened near Fresno Flats in 1868.

The Fresno Flats post office opened in 1873, and in 1912 the town was renamed Oakhurst — local accounts say a young bride circulated a petition to change the name because Fresno Flats was remembered as the home of a stagecoach robber.

The Madera Flume and Lumber Company began building a log flume near the town in 1874 to launch the local timber industry, and once the wagon road from Madera to Yosemite was completed in the late 1870s, tourism steadily became the area's chief economic activity.

Oakhurst sits at the junction of Highways 41 and 49, at the southern end of California's Gold Country, at an elevation of about 2,274 feet.

The pioneering computer-game company Sierra On-Line was headquartered in Oakhurst from 1981 to 1999, leading some to call the town the birthplace of computer gaming.

The 2020 census counted 5,945 residents in the Oakhurst CDP, which has about 2,200 households averaging about 2.7 people each.