Kings County, California

Kings County is a county located in the U.S. state of California. The population was 152,982 at the 2010 census. The California Department of Finance estimated that the county's population was 149,721 as of January 1, 2015. The county seat is Hanford.

Kings County comprises the Hanford-Corcoran, CA Metropolitan Statistical Area, which is also included in the Visalia-Porterville-Hanford, CA Combined Statistical Area. It is located in the San Joaquin Valley, a rich agricultural region.

History

The area was inhabited for thousands of years by American Indians including the Tachi Yokuts tribe. It was colonized by Spain, Mexico and the United States.

An 1805 expedition probably led by Spanish Army Lieutenant Gabriel Moraga recorded discovering the river, which they named El Rio de los Santos Reyes (River of the Holy Kings) after the Three Wise Men of the Bible. At the time of the United States conquest in 1848, the new government changed the name to Kings River after which the county was named.

Kings County (barque)

Kings County was a four masted barque built in 1890 at Kingsport, Nova Scotia on the Minas Basin. She was named to commemorate Kings County, Nova Scotia and represented the peak of the county's shipbuilding era. (A much smaller barque also named Kings County had been built in 1871.) Kings County was one of the largest wooden sailing vessels ever built in Canada and one of only two Canadian four-masted barques. (The other was the slightly smaller John M. Blaikie of Great Village, Nova Scotia.) At first registered as a four masted full rigged ship, she was quickly changed to a barque after her June 2 launch. More than three thousand people from Kings and Hants counties attended the launch. She survived a collision with an iceberg on an 1893 voyage to Swansea, Wales. Like many of the large wooden merchant ships built in Atlantic Canada, she spent most of her career far from home on trading voyages around the world. In 1909, she returned to the Minas Basin for a refit at Hantsport and loaded a large cargo of lumber. In 1911 she became the largest wooden ship to enter Havana Harbour when she delivered a cargo of lumber and was briefly stranded. She was lost a few months later on a voyage to Montevideo, Uruguay when she ran aground in the River Plate. Too damaged to repair, she was scrapped in Montevideo where her massive timbers were visible for many years.

California (1927 film)

California is a 1927 American Western silent film directed by W. S. Van Dyke and written by Marian Ainslee, Ruth Cummings and Frank Davis. The film stars Tim McCoy, Dorothy Sebastian, Marc McDermott, Frank Currier and Fred Warren. The film was released on May 7, 1927, by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

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341 California

341 California is an asteroid belonging to the Flora family in the Main Belt, that has an unusually high albedo.

It was discovered by Max Wolf on September 25, 1892 in Heidelberg.

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Etymology of California

California is a place name used by three North American states: in the United States by the state of California, and in Mexico by the states of Baja California and Baja California Sur. Collectively, these three areas constitute the region formerly referred to as Las Californias. The name California is shared by many other places in other parts of the world whose names derive from the original. The name "California" was applied to the territory now known as the state of California by one or more Spanish explorers in the 16th century and was probably a reference to a mythical land described in a popular novel of the time: Las Sergas de Esplandián. Several other origins have been suggested for the word "California", including Spanish, Latin, South Asian, and Aboriginal American origins. All of these are disputed.

California originally referred to the entire region composed of the Baja California peninsula now known as Mexican Baja California and Baja California Sur, and upper mainland now known as the U.S. states of California and parts of Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and Wyoming. After Mexico's independence from Spain, the upper territory became the Alta California province. In even earlier times, the boundaries of the Sea of Cortez and the Pacific Ocean coastlines were only partially explored and California was shown on early maps as an island. The Sea of Cortez is also known as the Gulf of California.