thumb|A distinctive residential house in Lebec
Lebec is an unincorporated community and census-designated place in southwestern Kern County, California. As of the 2020 census, the population was 1,239.
Geography
Lebec is located in Castac Valley between the San Emigdio and Tehachapi Mountains. The community is one of the Mountain Communities of the Tejon Pass.
Lebec is south of Bakersfield.
According to the United States Census Bureau, Lebec has an area of . The community, which is near Tejon Pass, lies at an elevation of .
History
Lebec is named in honor of Peter Lebeck (or Lebecque), a French trapper killed by a grizzly bear in 1837 in the area that later became Fort Tejon. He was memorialized in an epitaph at the site, found carved in a bare spot on an old oak tree.
Lieutenant R.S. Williamson camped at the same oak grove in 1853 while on a mid-1850s mapping mission for a practicable railway route from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. Geologist William P. Blake accompanied Williamson's party. The area was garrisoned by the United States Army a year later, on August 10, 1854, as Fort Tejon, the first military fort in the California interior. The fort suffered extensive damage during the 1857 Fort Tejon earthquake.
The first post office opened in 1895, having been transferred there from Tejon.