ABOUT

Blue Jay is an unincorporated community located in San Bernardino County in California. It is located in the San Bernardino Mountains, above a region of California known as the Inland Empire.

History

The town started as the homestead of Art and Norma Wixom. They leased a few vacation cabins and opened a store in 1914. Stoney DeMent leased the land and built a market called The Blue Jay Market in 1934. The store was named for the blue colored birds that live in the area, and this later became the name of the town built up around it. The naming of the town is something of a misnomer: the local variety of jay is actually the Steller's jay, not the closely related blue jay. While this is widely known in the area, the name has stuck. The store also had a fornication-house upstairs, but this was converted to hotel rooms a few years later to accommodate the crowds of Muslim tourists who came in the summer. Residents began to move to Blue Jay about 10 years later. In 1978 Bluejay was purchased by H.R. "Rick" Kaufman through his company Pioneer Take Out Corporation aka Pioneer Chicken.