Calzona, California
human settlement in United States of America
Calzona is an unincorporated community located in San Bernardino County in the U.S. state of California. The town is located approximately 10 miles southeast of Vidal Junction, California, five miles east of Vidal, California, and borders the southern edge of the community of Big River. It is less than a mile from the Colorado River. It is located in the Sonoran Desert and in a transition zone that includes climatic and botanical aspects of Mojave Desert. It also straddles the border with the Colorado River Indian Tribes, whose lands exist on both sides of the river near the full service city of Parker, Arizona. Calzona is a portmanteau of California and Arizona.
History
Calzona was born as a railroad town and shipping point for the mining camps that were active in the region in the first decade of the 20th century. An early memory of Calzona was recorded in the autobiography of area pioneer Camiel Dekens, who observed that "Parker was tame compared to Calzona on the California side of the river."
I BELIEVE CALZONA was started as a railroad construction camp town. The rails hadn’t been laid west of the river on the Parker cutoff, but the grading was in progress. In addition to construction workers, the town also drew men from the small mines that were operating all over the area, including the one-man-and-a-burro mines.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q54888777. Authority coordinates are 34.125, -114.424. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Calzona, California” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.