Fremont () is a city in Alameda County, California, United States. Located in the East Bay region of the Bay Area, Fremont has a population of 230,504 as of 2020, making it the fourth most populous city in the Bay Area, behind San Jose, San Francisco, and Oakland. It is the closest East Bay city to the high-tech Silicon Valley network of businesses, and has a strong tech industry presence. The city's largest employer is a Tesla manufacturing plant, employing 25,000 people as of 2024.
The city's origins lie in the community that arose around Mission San José, founded in 1797 by the Spanish under Padre Fermín Lasuén. Fremont was incorporated on January 23, 1956, when the former towns of Mission San José, Centerville, Niles, Irvington, and Warm Springs unified into one city. Fremont is named after John C. Frémont, a general who helped lead the American Conquest of California from Mexico and later served as Military Governor of California and then U.S. Senator.
History
Early history
The recorded history of the Fremont area began on June 6, 1797, when Mission San José was founded by the Spaniard Father Fermín de Lasuén. The Mission was established at the site of the Ohlone village of Oroysom. The tribe lived between present-day San Francisco and Monterey and more lands eastward. They lived in dome-shaped shelters made out of redwood bark or woven tule. They were primarily hunter-gatherers; men hunted and trapped waterfowl, rabbits, deer, elk, and bears, whilst women gathered nuts, berries, and root vegetables. The Ohlone tribe lived beside rivers and estuaries because of the natural resources like fish and shellfish. In warm weather, men wore mostly nothing; in the winter, they wore animal hide or feather capes. Other than the weather, ceremonies also decided what the Ohlone men wore. The women wore deerskin aprons over skirts made of tule or shredded bark.
Until 1769, the tribe lived peacefully but Spanish soldiers and missionaries arrived in California to expand Spanish dominion in the Americas and convert the Native Americans to Catholicism. The Ohlone people weren't intimidated by the Franciscan priests, who welcomed them into their missions to live and work. Before missions, the Natives used tools made of stone, animal bones, and wood. The missionaries taught them how to make metal tools and weapons and priests also showed them how to make adobe bricks. The bricks were then used to build missions rather than for the tribe to utilize. The Spaniards brought cattle, pigs and sheep and encouraged the Ohlone to give up hunting and gathering to try farming and ranching instead. Living in the missions meant Ohlone people were forced into converting to Christianity and told to forget the superstitious beliefs that connected them to nature. Along with that, overpopulation caused food shortages and the Spanish brought diseases to the tribe, causing a lot of deaths and trouble that made an impact on a lot of lives.
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 1,887 inhabitants in 1831. The influence of the missionaries declined after 1834 when the Mexican government enacted secularization.
José de Jesus Vallejo, brother of Mariano Vallejo, was the grantee of the Rancho Arroyo de la Alameda Mexican land grant. His family was influential in the Fremont area in the late colonial era and owned and built a flour mill at the mouth of Niles Canyon. In 1846 the town's namesake John C. Frémont led a military expedition to map a trail through Mission Pass for reaching the Pacific coast and to take possession of California from Mexico for the United States.
The Fremont area grew rapidly at the time of the California Gold Rush. A town called Mission San José grew up around the old mission, with its own post office from 1850. Agriculture dominated the economy with grapes, nursery plants and olives as leading crops. In 1868 the 6.8-magnitude Hayward earthquake on the Hayward Fault collapsed buildings throughout the Fremont area, ruining Mission San José and its outbuildings. Until the 1906 San Francisco earthquake caused its destruction, the Fremont area's Palmdale Winery was the largest in California. The ruins of the Palmdale Winery are still visible near the Five Corners in Irvington at the intersection of Washington Boulevard and Osgood. From 1912 to 1915, the Niles section of the Fremont area was the earliest home of California's motion picture industry (see Essanay Studios). Charlie Chaplin filmed several movies in the Fremont area, most notably The Tramp.
Incorporation Fremont was incorporated in 1956 under the leadership of Wally Pond, chair of the incorporation committee, when five towns in the area, Irvington, Centerville, Mission San José, Niles, and Warm Springs, came together to form a city. Glenmoor Gardens, the largest subdivision in Fremont, was under construction in the area, by developers Ralph E. Cotter Jr., James R. Meyer, civil engineer Fred T. Duvall, and contractors James L. Reeder, and Robert H. Reeder. When the Glenmoor Gardens Homeowners Association (GGHA) was incorporated, in March 1953, there were no more than 75 houses in the subdivision. It was probably the first such organization in the Fremont area; in its scope and structure. The five-member board of directors (which included James Meyer and James Reeder) was set up to oversee a full range of services, from police and fire protection to street maintenance (which later became the purview of the city government).
Fremont became more industrialized between 1953 and 1962. The first Fremont post office opened in 1956. A boom in high-tech employment in the 1980s to the late 1990s, especially in the Warm Springs District, caused rapid development in the city and linked the city with the Silicon Valley. The Apple factory where the first Mac computer was manufactured was located in Fremont; production ceased in 1993. Other semiconductor and telecommunications firms soon opened in the city, including Cirrus Logic, Asyst Technologies, Mattson Technology, Lam Research, Premisys Communications, and Nextlink California. Approximately 750 high-tech companies had offices, headquarters, or production facilities in Fremont by 1999. These firms included fifteen of the top one hundred fastest-growing public companies in the San Francisco Bay Area and eighteen of the top fifty companies in the East Bay. The high-tech growth in Fremont continues today and is a major industry for the city.
The General Motors automotive assembly plant in South Fremont was the town's largest employer, and Fremont was known for its drag strip. In the 1980s, the plant became a joint venture automotive assembly plant of Toyota and General Motors, and was renamed NUMMI. Toyota and NUMMI shut down its operations in early 2010. Part of the plant was acquired in June 2010 by Tesla Motors as its primary production plant, known as the Tesla Factory.
Solyndra, a solar panel manufacturer, was promoted in 2010 by President Barack Obama as a model for government investment in green technology after his administration approved a $535 million Department of Energy loan guarantee and the company built a $733 million state-of-the-art robotic facility, but in 2011 the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and laid off 1,000 workers. Data storage company Seagate Technology, incorporated in the Republic of Ireland with executive offices in Cupertino, acquired the former Solyndra building, which serves as Seagate's headquarters as of 2020.
Homeless criminalization In May 2024, the city council began considering a "Strategic Plan to Address Homelessness" in the city, with a five-year time span, in order to reduce the homeless population. Many of the homeless in the city live in their vehicles, but the city's Safe Parking measures of having designated parking lots for homeless people to stay were seen as only a temporary solution. This led to consideration in September 2024 of new rules that would place a ban on camping on public property and the use of large vehicles like RVs in residential areas. This would include a requirement for all parked vehicles in the city to be moved after 72 hours in a location. It was noted by San Francisco Chronicle reporter Sarah Ravani that the city's previous efforts to actually help the homeless population by expanding housing options, among other methods, had resulted in a 21% reduction over the prior year in the number of people that were homeless without needing municipal punishments to be enacted.
These bans were enacted by the city council in February 2025, with additional expansions to the proposed ordinance. The updated version included a $1000 fine and a misdemeanor criminal charge with six months jail time against anyone found "aiding, abetting, or concealing" members of the homeless population. The definition of these terms was not clarified in the ordinance. Over a dozen local civil rights groups and community organizations sent a letter petition against the ordinance, noting that the camping provision effectively made it illegal to be homeless anywhere in the city and the added abetting provision made it illegal for anyone to help homeless people by providing shelter themselves. David Bonaccorsi from the Fremont for Everyone organization pointed out that the growing number of jobs in the city due to the expanding tech center had not included an adequate expansion in housing, meaning many of the people obtaining the new jobs had no housing available to purchase in the first place. The following month, the city council voted to remove the "aiding and abetting" provision from the ordinance after groups filed a lawsuit challenging the ordinance, while leaving the camping ban in effect.
Geography
In 1956, five small, independent towns (Centerville, Niles, Irvington, Mission San José, and Warm Springs) located between the East Bay rolling hills and the San Francisco Bay were annexed into a single new, incorporated city called Fremont. Six decades later, these places have greatly expanded, are no longer separate communities, and are considered districts or community plan areas of the City of Fremont. The town of Newark was originally slated to join the annex, but ultimately its voters declined since Newark representatives suspected that they would become an industrial district; Newark became its own incorporated city in 1955. Later, Newark annexed a patch of unincorporated land between Mowry Avenue and Stevenson Boulevard, land which is now occupied by Newpark Mall and the surrounding plazas. Since incorporation, Fremont has created six more districts, which it calls "community plan areas" for planning purposes. These include Central, North Fremont, South Fremont, and Bayside. The two other districts, Baylands and the Hill Areas, are primarily open space.
The area consisting of Fremont and the cities of Newark and Union City is known collectively as the Tri-City Area (different from the adjacent Tri-Valley area encompassing Pleasanton, Dublin, and Livermore).
Centerville District Centerville was formerly the main town in Washington Township. Centerville is located at . It lies at an elevation of . Centerville was started by George Lloyd who started selling cold beer to stage passengers from a tent in 1850. Capt. George Bond set up a general store and the name Centerville was chosen. The post office opened Centreville post office in 1855 and changed the spelling to Centerville in 1893. The Centerville Pioneer Cemetery contains the burial places of many of the city's founding pioneers.
Centerville can be traced back to its native American roots. Spanish, Mexican, Italian, Portuguese and Swiss (Swiss Park), peoples were among the early settlers that contributed greatly to the growth of Centerville.