In June 1878, the Workingmen's Party was reported to have a majority vote over the Democrats in the town. In May 1878, Hanford residents drafted a resolve against the South Pacific Railroad from purchasing land with residing settlers. In 1878, Hanford began running their own newspaper service and wiring called 'The Public Good' which fed into other papers. In 1877, Hanford began to appear in state newspapers, giving details of events in the town's early days. The Hanford Carnegie Museum, originally built in 1905 as a library. According to History of Kings County: 'It was but a short step from sheep-camp to village and with the railroad as an attraction the village flourished and became a town within a few historic months.' Many of those working on the tracks were Chinese immigrants. Tracks were laid through a sheep camp in 1877. The earliest known document labeling the settlement as 'Hanford' is an 1876 map of Tulare County which once included the territory of present-day Kings County. Hanford's namesake was James Madison Hanford, an executive for the company. As the settlement grew, Tulare Lake's feeding rivers were diverted for agricultural irrigation, causing it to gradually shrink and, over the 19th and 20th centuries, effectively become extinct.įrom the mid-to-late 1870s, the Southern Pacific Railroad planned to lay tracks towards the developing farmland west of Visalia, spurring a growth in labor and population. The earliest dated grave in the area was that of a young Alice Spangler who was initially buried in the Kings River Cemetery just north of her family's farm in 1860. Since the annexation of California after the Mexican-American War, the locality was settled by Americans and immigrants as farmland, broadly referred to as 'Mussel Slough'. They occupied locations along watercourses such as creeks, springs and seep areas (such as sloughs), along perennial and seasonal drainages, as well as flat ridges and terraces.

The area was inhabited by the Tachi Yokuts Indians for several thousand years prior to Euro-American contact. Today's Hanford was once north of Tulare Lake, historically the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi River.

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