Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Pixley, CA

Pixley is a census-designated place in Tulare County — an unincorporated farm town, not an incorporated city — in the southern San Joaquin Valley along the Highway 99 corridor, about 25 miles south of Visalia.

Pixley began as a real-estate speculation in 1884, and in 1886 Frank M. Pixley joined investors Darwin C. Allen and William B. Bradbury in the Pixley Townsite Company; the town was named for Pixley, a former California Attorney General and editor of the San Francisco journal The Argonaut, which he used to advertise the town.

Pixley prospered once the Southern Pacific Railroad extended its tracks to the townsite and made Pixley a stop, growing into a major grain shipping point with a depot and a three-story hotel.

In the early 1890s, the outlaw train robbers Chris Evans and John Sontag robbed a Southern Pacific train at Pixley.

In 1933 Pixley was a flashpoint of the San Joaquin cotton strike: a violent clash between strikers and growers left two workers dead and eight wounded, and 5,000 workers gathered for the dead strikers' funerals in one of the largest agricultural demonstrations in California history — events echoed in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

Pixley's cropland is devoted largely to cotton, alfalfa, beans, grain, and vineyards, and the town functions as a rural agricultural service center for southwest Tulare County.

Pixley has a semi-arid climate under the Köppen classification, typical of the dry southern San Joaquin Valley floor.

Pixley had a population of 3,828 at the 2020 census, up from 3,310 in 2010 and just 1,327 in 1960.

Pixley has about 975 households with a large average household size of 3.92 people, and renters outnumber owners — only about 42% of occupied homes are owner-occupied.

Pixley is a young, overwhelmingly Latino farmworker community: about 87% of residents were Hispanic or Latino in 2020, more than a third of residents were under 18, and the median age was just 26.5 years.