 Fremont (IPA: [fɹimɑnt]) is a city in California which was incorporated on January 23, 1956, from the merger of five smaller communities: Centerville, Irvington, Mission San Jose, Niles, and Warm Springs. The area now comprising Fremont and the adjoining cities of Newark (now an enclave within Fremont) and Union City was formerly known as Washington Township. Fremont is located in the southeast area of the San Francisco Bay Area in Alameda County. The city is named after John Charles Frémont, "the Great Pathfinder."
Home to 210,158 people as of a 2005 estimate, Fremont is the fourth most populous city in the Bay Area. Due in large measure to immigration by refugees fleeing the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, Afghan Civil War, and small amounts during the Taliban government during the late 1980s and 1990s, Fremont had the largest Afghan population in the United States in 2001 and still has a large Afghan population today. The diverse city demographics includes many Asian ethnic groups, including Indians, Chinese, Taiwanese, and other Asian groups, concentrated most heavily in the Mission San Jose District.
Fremont is the sister city to Elizabeth, South Australia and Fukaya, Saitama in Japan.
Fremont is also the name of the fictional, unrelated California town portrayed by the cable television drama "Wildfire."
Fremont has a community college, Ohlone College, and five public high schools: Washington, Mission San Jose, Irvington, American and Kennedy. These five high schools, along with James Logan High School in Union City and Newark Memorial High School in Newark, make up the Mission Valley Athletic League (M.V.A.L.). The University of California, Berkeley has an extension campus located in Fremont, and Northwestern Polytechnic University and DeVry University, two private universities, offer undergraduate, graduate and doctoral programs in technology and management areas. Silicon Valley College provides high-tech associate degree programs, and the city is also home to Northern California's School for the Deaf and School for the Blind.
The recorded history of the Fremont area began on June 9, 1797 when Mission San José was founded by the Spaniard Father Fermin de Lasuen. The Mission was established at the site of the Ohlone native village of Oroysom. On their second day in the area, the Mission party killed a grizzly bear in Niles Canyon. The first English-speaking visitor to Fremont was the renowned trapper and explorer Jedediah Smith in 1827. The Mission prospered, eventually reaching a population of 1,886 inhabitants in 1831. The influence of the missionaries declined after 1834, when the Mexican government enacted secularization.
The family of Don José de Jesus Vallejo, brother of Mariano Vallejo, was the most influential in Fremont in the late colonial era. His family owned a large rancho and built a flour mill at the mouth of Niles Canyon. In 1846 they were visited and robbed by the town's namesake John C. Frémont. Fremont grew rapidly at the time of the Gold Rush. Agriculture dominated the economy with grapes, nursery plants and olives as leading crops. In 1868 a magnitude 6.8 earthquake on the Hayward Fault collapsed buildings throughout Fremont, ruining Mission San José and its outbuildings. Until the 1906 San Francisco earthquake caused its destruction, Fremont's Palmdale Winery was the largest in California. The ruins of the Palmdale Winery are still visible near the Five Corners in Irvington.
From 1912-1916 the Niles section of Fremont was the earliest home of California's motion picture industry.[1] Charlie Chaplin filmed several movies in Fremont, most notably "The Tramp." Fremont was incorporated in 1956, when five towns in the area came together to form a city. Fremont became more industrialized in the 1950s and 1960s when a large General Motors assembly plant (later NUMMI) was constructed. A boom in high-tech employment in the 1980s and 1990s, especially in the Warm Springs District, caused rapid development in the city.
|
