Hesperia's origins began as a Spanish land grant: Rancho San Felipe, Las Flores y el Paso del Cajon founded in 1781. The first inhabitants were Serrano Indians. They lived in the normally dormant Mojave River bed, but the land was sparsely inhabited desert during Spanish-Mexican rule in the 19th century. The U.S. annexed the region along with Southern California after the Mexican-American war in 1848.
The town site was originally laid out in 1891 by railroad company land developers of the US & Santa Fe Railroad completed that year. Hesperia was named for "Hesperus", the Greek god of the west. The railroad land developers published pamphlets distributed across the country with boosterism of Hesperia, California, as a potential metropolis: to become "the Omaha of the West" or projections to have over 100,000 people by the year 1900, but only 1,000 moved in.
Hesperia grew relatively slowly until the completion of U.S. Routes 66, 91 and 395 in the 1940s followed by Interstate 15 in the late 1960s. A total of 30 square miles (78 km2) of land was laid out for possible residential development: roads were set up, but hardly any houses were built, until the wave of newcomers arrived at Hesperia in the 1980s. Suburban growth transformed the small town of 5,000 people in 1970 to a moderate-sized community of over 60,000 by the year 2000.
Kinda boring.
