Adelanto, California

Adelanto is a city in San Bernardino County, California, about nine miles northwest of Victorville in the Victor Valley of the Mojave Desert, in the northern part of the Inland Empire. Its name is Spanish for advance or progress, and it was first given to the post office established on the site in 1917. The 2020 census counted 38,046 residents. The area was first inhabited by the Serrano people. E. H. Richardson, the inventor of what became the Hotpoint electric iron, founded the town in 1915, selling his patent and buying land with the aim of building one of the first planned communities in Southern California. Orchards of deciduous fruit once covered the area and later gave way to poultry ranches, and the nearby Victorville Army Air Field, later George Air Force Base, opened in the early 1940s. The community was a community services district until it incorporated as a city in 1970, and it became a charter city in November 1992.