Like much of eastern Sacramento County, the lands of Easton were once fertile gold fields. The Natomas Company mined this site for gold from the late 1800s to 1950 using dredges that created long rows of rock mounds, called tailings, up to seventy feet high.

Although the mining left the land unsuitable for agricultural production, the more than 12,000-acre site was a perfect home for Aerojet-General, one of the nation's leading aerospace and defense research and development companies during the Cold War and the space race. Today, Aerojet is a GenCorp company, with more than 1,500 employees on the Sacramento campus.

A small percentage of the Aerojet lands have been actively used for the Company’s aerospace operations during the last 50 years. The majority of this land was used to provide safe buffer zones for Aerojet's testing and manufacturing operations.

Today, the large buffer lands are no longer necessary to support Aerojet’s mission, and the company is able to operate within a much smaller industrial footprint. This makes much of the land—approximately 6,000 acres—available for the creation of Easton.