Old Highway 399, Part 5: The Maricopa Highway (Santa Barbara County Line to Maricopa) (CA 33, CA 33/CA 166)

From here, we finish the Maricopa Highway with its grand descent into Maricopa itself and the California Central Valley, leaving the mountains behind for the breadbasket plains. US 399 touches no less than three counties in this section (four if you count Ventura from Part 4) in a very few short miles, namely Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo and finally Kern county, where we will remain until our terminus in Bakersfield; as we are in the first two counties for only a few miles at most I will defer their discussion to the future US 101 exhibit.

Kern county was not part of the original 27 California counties; on California's declaration of statehood on 9 September 1850, it was originally part of then-Mariposa county. Further juggling of county lines caused Kern county to be formed from a portion cut from Tulare county and Los Angeles county in 1855, first called Buena Vista county, but then changed to Kern in 1866 after the Kern River. The Kern River, in turn, derived its name from topographer Edward Kern, who helped to plot officer John C. Fremont's 1845 expedition. The county is topographically diverse, running from the oil-rich plains of the west to the mountainous reaches of the east (see US Highway 395 Part 2 for a little of that; eventually we will do some highlights from CA 58 [old US 466] and the Tehachapi Pass). Originally a mining region, Kern's first county seat was the now isolated town of Havilah south of Lake Isabella along the mountainous canyons of the Kern River. Appropriately, the name came from the Biblical story of Havilah, "where there is gold" (Genesis 2:11); the 1868 courthouse still stands and is a local museum.

As people eventually found out that the real Havilah was nowhere near Kern county, its residents turned to other pursuits, including attempting to drain the then-swampy southern San Joaquin Valley to make it suitable for farming. Large-scale canal construction made controlled drainage and irrigation possible, and within a decade the agricultural production of the county far outpaced its mining output; as a result, the hub of this newly and still productive region, Bakersfield, became the new county seat in 1874. We will reach Bakersfield at the very end, in Part 8. Kern county is also California's top oil-producing county, because we're not allowed to fricking drill off the coast, with over 85% of the state's active oil wells producing 66% of the state's total output and 10% of the entire United States', at over 500,000 barrels a day [1999]. We will pass the largest of these, the remarkable Midway-Sunset fields, on our way into Taft (Part 6). Here are some interesting facts about Kern county oil. Kern county also still does produce a certain amount of gold even now, but is better known for its borax operations and for its kernite, named for the county, another borate mineral whose only known source for decades was the region. Kern also has a rich aerospace industry, including the world-famous Edwards Air Force Base and the Mojave Spaceport. Its present population is 779,869 [2006].