[7] According to the United States Census Bureau, the city covers an area of 5.136 square miles (13.30 km2), all of it land.

The route of the Southern Pacific through California's Central Valley gave rise to a string of small towns between Sacramento and Bakersfield.

[10] A decade later, four farmers – Jacob E. Whitson, Egbert H. Tucker, George Otis and Monroe Snyder – formed a partnership and developed a townsite along the railroad.

As Lewis first told the story in 1925, Stanford, also a Director of the Central Pacific Railroad, was so taken that he ordered that the next town on the line be named for her.

Lewis often repeated the story with further romantic embellishments, and it came to be accepted as fact despite a lack of documentary evidence.

[17] Along with Fowler to its immediate north and Kingsburg to its south, Selma was a railroad stop where agricultural goods could be loaded for shipping.

William De La Grange of Selma was tired of irrigationists draining Kings River water from the canal he used so he drilled an open bottom well.

[18] Wheat growing was Selma's first economic engine but was replaced by orchards and vineyards when farmers realized how well peaches, plums, and grapes grew in the sandy soil, irrigated with snow-melt water imported through canals from the nearby Sierra Nevada mountain range.

A decline in family farming, the national trend in U.S. agriculture after World War II, and depressed prices for raisins and table grapes, especially in the last decades of the twentieth century, were drains on the Selma-area agribusiness economy.

Post–World War II development spread the growing city to the north and east, away from its business center.

U.S. Highway 99, once a main road running north–south through town, parallel to the railroad, was rebuilt as a freeway (now SR 99) in the 1960s.

Several blocks to the west of the old road (now Whitson Street and Golden State Boulevard), the freeway bisects the oldest residential neighborhood in Selma.

The freeway also made Selma more attractive as a place to live for Fresno workers, who contributed to ever-faster residential growth into the 21st century.

The downtown experienced one of its biggest changes when Walmart built a large retail store at the intersection of East Floral Avenue and the freeway—at the northwest edge of town.

As the 21st century began, this area became the de facto commercial center of the city providing great economic benefits.

The old downtown, despite vacant storefronts, remained a struggling but viable district of city offices and small businesses.

Clarence Berry (1867–1930), who struck it rich in the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897 and became known as an innovative mining engineer and businessman, had earlier been a fruit farmer in Selma.

In 1947, she met Jack Kerouac who represented her as "The Mexican Girl" in On the Road where Selma is referred to as Sabinal.