Moorpark

Moorpark

Moorpark is a city in Ventura County in Southern California. Moorpark was founded when the application for the Moorpark Post Office was granted on June 1, 1900. The townsite of Moorpark was owned and surveyed by Robert Poindexter and his wife, Madeline. The town has experienced a great amount of growth since the late 1970s. The population was 34,421 at the 2010 census, up from 31,415 at the 2000 census.

The valley where Moorpark is located was originally inhabited by the Chumash. The area was part of the large Rancho Simi land grant given in 1795 to the Pico brothers (Javier, Patricio, and Miguel) by Governor Diego de Borica of Alta California.

Simi Land Company

Robert W. Poindexter, the secretary of the Simi Land Company, received the land that made up the original townsite of Moorpark when the association was disbanded in 1887. Moorpark was founded in 1900 when the application for a post office was submitted. The application lists that there was already a railroad depot in the town. The town grew after the 1904 completion of a 7,369-foot (2,246 m) tunnel through the Santa Susana Mountains, which allowed the Southern Pacific Railroad to establish a depot there, a depot which lasted until 1965.

Moorpark was one of the first cities to run off nuclear power in the entire world, and the first in the United States. For one hour on November 12, 1957 this fact was featured on Edwin R. Murrow’s “See It Now” television show.[14] The reactor, called the Sodium Reactor Experiment was built by the Atomics International division of North American Aviation at the nearby Santa Susana Field Laboratory. The Sodium Reactor Experiment operated from 1957 to 1964 and produced 7.5 megawatts of electrical power at a Southern California Edison-supplied generating station.