TWHP


Vallejo, City & Shipyard   

After General Vallejo offered extensive amounts of free land for a state capitol in 1850, the legislature accepted, naming the town for its benefactor. The lawmakers convened their first session there in early 1852, but Vallejo was a raw, unpleasant place, the capitol building a mere shell, surrounded by mud and lacking furniture. The next year, they voted to abandon the place for Benicia, but the town survived because of the nearby farms and its felicitous situation where the Napa River empties into the Carquinez Straits at the head of the bay.

In 1852, the Navy bought Mare Island--named after a favorite horse of General Vallejo that had escaped and turned up across the river--and the base opened in 1854, under the command of David Farragut, a later Civil War hero. Vallejo prospered as the shipyard expanded and the town served as an outlet for agriculture. When the California Pacific Railroad organized in 1867 and built a line from Sacramento to South Vallejo to funnel traffic from the newly-completed Transcontinental Railroad to San Francisco, the town experienced its first real estate boom. It soon became one of the bay's major grain ports, with large facilities where the train ended and the shipping and ferryboats departed for San Francisco and beyond.

Houses covered the hills in greater numbers as Navy and commercial interests expanded their activities in the 1870s and '80s, and with a major effort to modernize the nation's fleet, Vallejo prospered further with shipbuilding. The Spanish-American War accelerated the growth, and the Navy came to dominate an economy that ultimately became almost wholly dependent on it.


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