A
town in
Central California just east of the crux of
Highway 198 and
Highway 99, pop. approximately 92,000, roughly 28 square miles, approximately equidistant from
San Francisco and
Los Angeles. Formerly known as "The
Gateway to the
Sequoias." It is the county seat for
Tulare County.
Visalia was founded by Nathaniel Vise in 1852, just a few short years after the California Gold Rush. However, Visalia was nothing of a gold rush sort of town. It in fact used to be a forest of uninhabitable oak trees. To this day, it is a city ordinance to name streets, parks and schools to the natural heritage the area has.
Visalia and Tulare County consistently ranks as one of the three most productive counties in the United States in terms of agriculture output. As a result, crop dust and pesticides have also been poured into the air, and Visalia was listed on the Today Show as the 4th highest polluted city in the nation. But if you were to come here, you'd easily see that it is nothing like the smog of LA, although the valley makes it so that we get all of their crap when the wind blows north, and it has nowhere else to go.
I'm not bitter.