Fairfield Homes Guide

Fairfield Real Estate

Introduction

Yellow Poppies

Fairfield, California, is a northern California city of about one hundred thousand people that lies approximately halfway between San Francisco and Sacramento. The settlement that became Fairfield was established in the early 1850s as a post on a trade route connecting the Bay Area of San Francisco with the gold camps of the Sierra Nevada. Named in 1859 by its founder, a clipper ship captain, after his hometown of Fairfield, Connecticut, Fairfield became the county seat of Solano County in 1860, though the city of Fairfield, itself, was not formally incorporated until 1903. In the late 1860s, some of the wind went out of Fairfield’s sails, temporarily, when the builders of the trans-Continental railroad routed their line through neighboring Suisun City, in stead of Fairfield. Suisun City, with its access to both rail and water transport, remained the hub of freight activity in the region until trucking overtook rail transit in importance and Interstate 80 was built through Fairfield in the 1960s. Fairfield is now the home of Travis Air Force Base, the Jelly Belly Factory – at One Jelly Belly Lane, an Anheuser-Busch Brewery, and a manufacturing facility for Thompson Candy – on Watney Way. It maintains close ties with the nearby communities of Vacaville, Benecia, Vallejo, and its adjacent sister city of Suisun City.