Insurance in Benicia, California

Benicia was the third site selected to serve as the California state capital, and its newly constructed city hall was California's capitol from February 11, 1853, to February 25, 1854. Soon after the legislature was moved to the courthouse in Sacramento, which has remained the state capital ever since. The restored capitol building is part of the Benicia Capitol State Historic Park, and is the only building remaining of the state's early capital buildings, which were in San Jose and Vallejo. Benicia was also the county seat of Solano County until 1858, when that was moved to Fairfield. The City of Benicia was founded on May 19, 1847, by Dr. Robert Semple, and Thomas O. Larkin and Comandante General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, on land sold to them by General Vallejo in December 1846. It was named for the General's wife, Francisca Benicia Carillo de Vallejo. The General intended that the city be named "Francisca" after his wife, but this name was dropped when the former city of "Yerba Buena" changed its name to "San Francisco". So Sra. Vallejo's second given name was used instead. In his memoirs, William Tecumseh Sherman contended that Benicia was "the best natural site for a commercial city" in the region. In 1879, the Central Pacific Railroad re-routed the Sacramento-Oakland portion of its transcontinental line, establishing a major railroad ferry across the Carquinez Strait from Benicia to Port Costa. The world's largest ferry, the Solano, later joined by the even larger Contra Costa, carried entire trains across the Carquinez Strait from Benicia to Port Costa, from whence they continued on to the Oakland Pier. In 1901, the world's first long-distance powerline crossing over Carquinez Strait was built. After California's wheat output dropped in the early 20th Century and especially after the Southern Pacific constructed a railroad bridge at Martinez in 1930 to replace the ferry crossing, Benicia declined until the economic boom of World War II, which doubled the population to about 7,000 residents. Northeast of the town's residential areas an oil refinery was built and completed in 1969 by Humble Oil . The refinery was later bought by Valero Energy Corporation, a San Antonio-based oil company, in 2000. Between 1970 and 1995, the population of Benicia grew steadily at a rate of about 1,000 people per year, and the city changed from a poor, blue-collar town of 7,000 to a white-collar bedroom suburb of 28,000.