Stratford, CA

Stratford is a Kings County census-designated place near the old shoreline of Tulare Lake, fourteen miles southwest of Hanford. Settlers dug irrigation canals around the lake basin in the late 1890s, and the Empire Investment Company laid out the town as Stratton in the early 1900s. A local women’s club pushed the name change to Stratford in 1906. The Kings River now runs through an artificial channel toward the normally dry lakebed south of town. Stratford is a Central California place whose map still follows canals, lakebed, river, and the name its residents chose.