It is said that Apple Valley got its name because there are no apple trees there.
There were big Apple Valley land scams going on in LA when I was a kid in the 50s. Hesperia was one. They’d show phony pictures of trees and lakes and get people to buy land out there sight unseen. So many people bought land and insisted in building up there that they eventually had to incorporate.
Actually, there were plenty of apples in the 1920s. They all died after the LA aqueduct siphoned off all of the watershed from the entire Eastern Sierras. There were many farms from Owens Valley to San Bernardino that were lost due to the loss of water. LA bought a single strip of land along the base of the mountains and took all the water. The farmers spent quite a few years blowing up sections of the aqueduct in protest, but they never had the political power to do anything. Such was the beginning of global warming...