Traversing the Tehachapi Mountains seemed an insurmountable task until the plan for The Loop was developed. Photo by Carleton E. Watkins circa 1876. Courtesy of California State Library.
This website was born of an idea to try to organize the history of Tehachapi, California, to make more information easily accessible to more people. That’s a big job.
I started gathering information and then decided it would be easier to create the infrastructure first so material can be published more quickly. This means that if you’ve happened upon this website early on, it will seem quite incomplete. I hope you’ll check back.
My plan is to organize posts by categories, such as topic or date range. One category I will use is called “Perspective.” In these posts, I’ll do my best to provide information to help readers better understand the themes that tie Tehachapi history together.
I hope you’ll wish me luck!
— Claudia Elliott
April 2021, Brookings, Oregon
PS — I moved back to Tehachapi in September 2021. It’s taken me a while to get organized, but I’m back to work on this site now. I decided to concentrate first on capturing and indexing information published in one of Tehachapi’s early newspapers, a forerunner to Tehachapi News. Check out The Tomawk Project for the latest posts to this website.