Basin wiki · Places
Twentynine Palms
29 Palms · City of Twentynine Palms · Mara
An oasis town on the Pinto Mountain Fault: Serrano village, veterans’ health refuge, glider school, and today the city beside the Marine base.
Mara
The Serrano called the oasis Mara, “the place of little springs and much grass.” A legend holds that a medicine man told them to plant a palm for each boy born there, and that they planted 29 in the first year. The town’s name comes from that story.[2] Read it as a legend. In the Serrano creation story told by elder Dorothy Ramon, the Maringa Serrano lived at Mara from the beginning until sometime between 1850 and 1870. After that the Chemehuevi lived there.[3] American survey parties in the 1850s found corn, beans, pumpkins, and squash under cultivation. Chemehuevi families settled at the oasis in 1867, and a 1902 census counted 37 Serrano and Chemehuevi living there. By 1913 they had all left, pushed out as non-Indian settlement grew.[2] The Twenty-Nine Palms Band of Mission Indians, a Chemehuevi people, carries that history today.[4]
The water under the palms
The oasis exists because groundwater rises along the Pinto Mountain Fault.[2] The spring stopped flowing at the surface in the mid-1940s as the water table dropped, and the park has irrigated the palms since the 1980s to keep them alive.[9] The Twentynine Palms Corporation donated the oasis to the National Park Service in 1950 for its headquarters and main visitor center.[2]
Prospectors, then patients
Bill McHaney became the first non-Indian resident in 1879. Jack Rankin and Billy Neaves later built an adobe at the east end of the oasis that served as a home, a stage stop, and a meeting place for more than 40 years.[2] Prospectors in the 1870s used Mara as a camp to rest and refill water before heading into the desert.[5] The town itself grew out of World War I. Dr. James B. Luckie of Pasadena treated veterans with lung damage from mustard gas. In the 1920s he went looking for a dry desert climate that would help them and chose Twentynine Palms.[5] Veterans brought their families and took up 160-acre homesteads, and that is why the city is still spread so wide.[1][5] Two-rut roads came in from 1927, along with a school.[1] That 1920s schoolhouse is the oldest public building in the Morongo Basin and now houses the 29 Palms Historical Society’s museum.[8]
From gliders to Marines
In 1941 the Army surveyed the area and found ridge lift off the nearby hills, the rising air that keeps gliders aloft. The Twentynine Palms Air Academy, later called Condor Field, trained more than 1,600 glider pilots between January 1942 and March 1943.[7] The field then trained powered-aircraft pilots. In 1944 the Navy took it over as an auxiliary air station, and after the war it sat in caretaker status.[6] In 1952 a detachment of Marines from Camp Pendleton arrived to oversee construction of a new training center on the old glider base. It is now the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, about 935 square miles of live-fire training ground.[6] The base shapes the city’s population. The 2020 census counted 28,065 residents with a median age of 25.7.[10] Copper Mountain College began here too, with about 60 students at Twentynine Palms High School in fall 1967.[11]
The city
Twentynine Palms incorporated on November 23, 1987, and has a council-manager government with a five-member council.[1] It is the park’s north gateway, with headquarters and the Oasis Visitor Center at the oasis.[2] At about 1,990 feet it sits more than 1,000 feet below Yucca Valley. It averages about 89 days a year at 100°F or hotter, with a record of 119°F in July 1961.[10] Look for the Oasis of Murals on downtown walls and the Historical Society’s Weed Show each November.[10]
Names and lines
Twentynine is one word in the city’s name, and “29 Palms” is the spoken short form. The incorporated city and the unincorporated homestead tracts farther east, including Wonder Valley, are different jurisdictions even when people talk about them as one place. If a permit or a sheriff call matters, confirm which side of the city limit you are on.[1]