Fairfield: A City of Unlikely Connections
Fairfield is a Solano County city midway between San Francisco and Sacramento.
Founded in 1856 and incorporated in 1903, it began as a county seat on donated land from a ship captain.
Fairfield's landmarks range from a working candy factory and a major Air Force base to restored courthouses and volcanic parks.
Its past and present meet in places where industry, land, and people shaped the city's daily life.
A clipper captain founded the town and won the county seat
Clipper ship captain Robert H. Waterman laid out Fairfield in 1856 and named it for Fairfield, Connecticut.
In 1858, he offered 16 acres for public buildings to move Solano County's seat from Benicia to Fairfield.
Voters approved the change that November, and the county government relocated to a square at Texas and Union Streets.
The city later incorporated in 1903.
Waterman retired nearby after record-setting voyages and remained active in local affairs.
The basic street grid downtown still follows his early plat, with civic buildings clustered around the county complex that grew from the original land grant.
The Bay Area city that runs the Air Force's busiest gateway
Fairfield's Travis Air Force Base, 3 miles east of downtown, is called the "Gateway to the Pacific" and moves more cargo and passengers than any other U.S. military air terminal.
The installation began as Fairfield–Suisun Army Air Base in 1942, then shifted to Air Mobility Command.
Today, it hosts the 60th Air Mobility Wing, the 349th Air Mobility Wing, and the 621st Contingency Response Wing.
The base's David Grant USAF Medical Center spans over 808,000 square feet with staffed inpatient beds and an aeromedical staging facility that supports West Coast evacuations.
Its mission ties Fairfield directly to global airlift routes that cross the Pacific and beyond.
Mr. Miyagi's actor was an Armijo grad
Noriyuki "Pat" Morita, later known worldwide for playing Mr. Miyagi in 1984, graduated from Armijo High School in Fairfield in 1949.
Born in Isleton, he spent formative years in Northern California and attended Armijo after World War II.
Morita first worked away from entertainment before turning to stand-up and television, then film.
His Oscar nomination for "The Karate Kid" brought lasting visibility, and local school sources still list him among notable alumni.
A county namesake figure stands on Texas Street
A bronze Chief Solano statue greets visitors at the Solano County Events Center, 601 Texas Street in downtown Fairfield.
The piece depicts Sem-Yeto, known as Chief Solano, for whom the county is named.
It stands within the cluster of county offices that moved to Fairfield after the seat shifted in 1858.
The statue's placement on Texas Street keeps the county's identity linked to Fairfield's civic core.
People crossing between government buildings pass the figure on everyday errands, a reminder that the city's administrative role dates to the 19th century and remains centered on this block.
A jelly bean headquarters with a portrait gallery
The Jelly Belly headquarters and factory at 1 Jelly Belly Lane turns out the brand's beans and displays a permanent bean art collection.
The gallery includes portraits of figures like Ronald Reagan, Elvis Presley, and Abraham Lincoln rendered from thousands of candies.
Visitors can walk a self-guided tour route that looks onto production lines and finishing rooms, then exit through a factory store stocked with the company's full flavor lineup.
The Fairfield plant is the company's West Coast production hub and visitor center, drawing families, school groups, and confectionery fans to a working floor where classic flavors are made in batch pans and polished for shipping.
Factory seconds with their own fan base
At the Fairfield factory store, Jelly Belly sells "Belly Flops" by the bag.
These are fully flavored beans that missed strict size or shape targets during sorting.
Bags mix oddball forms, color overlaps, and fused pieces that did not qualify as retail-perfect jelly beans.
The company packages them for discount sale in 2-pound sacks and larger boxes that rotate by availability.
The brand treats them as a separate line rather than waste, and visitors often leave the tour with Flops as a souvenir.
It is a glimpse of how a candy maker handles off-spec product without tossing it.
Downtown shuts down for tomatoes every summer
Fairfield's Tomato & Vine Festival takes over downtown in mid-August with produce tastings, cooking demos, live music, and wine and beer gardens.
The two-day event runs on Saturday and Sunday with extended hours, packing Texas Street with vendor booths and stages.
Recent lineups featured multiple bands across the weekend and local growers selling varieties by the pound.
The festival's footprint stretches around the Green and adjacent blocks, turning the civic core into a food market and concert site.
It is organized by the city and staged within easy walking distance of parking garages and the county complex.
A new chapter for Suisun Valley wine in Fairfield
Suisun Valley's vineyards push right up to Fairfield neighborhoods, and a recent arrival stamped that connection.
The Wagner family opened Caymus-Suisun off Suisun Valley Parkway in 2022, adding a major tasting room and visitor center on Fairfield soil.
Longtime local producers like Wooden Valley Winery anchor the area's farming tradition, while newer labels bring expanded visitation.
The tasting rooms sit minutes from Interstate 80 yet pour from vines that lie in the valley's heat-shadow, where afternoon Delta breezes cool grapes through summer.
The result is a wine district physically tied to the city, not a distant day trip.
A big brewery that makes some of its own power
The Anheuser-Busch brewery in Fairfield, which opened in the 1970s, added renewable energy on-site to cut grid demand.
A wind turbine and on-site bioenergy recovery from wastewater supply a portion of the plant's electrical needs, alongside solar.
The anaerobic system captures biogas from brewing effluent and feeds it to power generation equipment, reducing both energy purchases and waste hauling.
The facility produces national brands for West Coast distribution and sits near I-80 for outbound freight.
Its process changes show how a large food-and-beverage plant can integrate energy projects within an existing production footprint.
A top pro wrestler was born here
AEW star Mercedes Moné (formerly WWE's Sasha Banks) was born in Fairfield on January 26, 1992.
She later launched her career from the Boston area, but official biographies and athletic databases list Fairfield, California, as her birthplace.
Moné has held major singles and tag titles across promotions and crossed into film and television.
A city park built on volcanic rock
Rockville Hills Regional Park spans 633 acres inside Fairfield, with trails threading blue oak woodland, grassland savanna, and outcrops of Sonoma Volcanics.
Geologic mapping identifies basalt and andesite flows and breccias from Miocene and Pliocene episodes, which explains the slick-rock stretches and shallow soils hikers see across the ridges.
The city converted the area to open space rather than development, preserving a close-in place to walk, ride, and watch seasonal seep ponds fill after rains.
From the higher knolls, you can look toward Mount Diablo and the Suisun watershed while standing on old lava that shaped the park's topography.
A 1911 courthouse reopened after a top-to-bottom restoration
The Old Solano Courthouse at 580 Texas Street is a Beaux Arts granite landmark designed by E. C. Hemmings in 1911.
After decades of hard service and later vacancy, the state renovated the building with seismic, life-safety, accessibility, and systems upgrades.
Work finished in fall 2014, and the courthouse reopened for civil calendars with three courtrooms and restored historic finishes.
The 29,900-square-foot building once again anchors Fairfield's civic center, with the county's other justice facilities a short walk away.
The project preserved the classical facade while adding discreet modern elements, returning a century-old county symbol to daily use.
A rail-to-trail spine follows an old interurban
Fairfield's Linear Park runs more than 6 miles along the former Sacramento Northern Railway right-of-way, connecting neighborhoods, schools, and shopping streets.
The paved path, landscaping, and pocket parks reclaim an electric interurban corridor that once linked the East Bay and the Valley.
Today, cyclists and walkers move between Texas Street, the Solano Town Center area, and residential districts without mixing with high-speed traffic.
Lighting, benches, and plazas mark old station locations.
The corridor's straight geometry telegraphs its rail history even as it functions as a city greenway that threads directly through central and north Fairfield.
A two-city Amtrak stop opened with Fairfield as the owner
The Fairfield-Vacaville Hannigan rail station started service on November 13, 2017, at 4921 Vanden Road.
Owned by the City of Fairfield, the island-platform stop serves Capitol Corridor trains and FAST bus connections.
The project added a broad pedestrian and bicycle passage under the tracks and expanded the nearby Peabody Road overpass.
The station fills a gap between Suisun-Fairfield and Davis, giving northern Fairfield, the Vanden corridor, and neighboring Vacaville a closer rail option.
Station naming later honored the late Assemblymember Tom Hannigan, who played a central role in developing the Capitol Corridor service.
Three major highways meet inside the city limits
Within Fairfield's Cordelia area, I-80, I-680, and State Route 12 converge in a single interchange complex.
The multi-year rebuild is split into packages to add connectors, widen ramps, and improve regional access between the Bay Area, the Delta, and the Sacramento Valley.
Package work has already produced a new Green Valley Road interchange and a direct westbound SR-12 connector from westbound I-80.
The project's footprint stretches from Fairfield's Green Valley and Cordelia neighborhoods toward Suisun City, tightening a long-standing choke point where North Bay east-west and north-south corridors meet.