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DIXON T
he city was going to be called Dicksonville after pioneer Thomas Dickson, who donated 10 acres of his property for a railroad depot, but a merchandise shipment in 1872 misspelled the name as Dixon. Almost two years of trying to have the town formally named Dicksonville ended in 1874 when the county recorder filed the name Dixon on new maps. Dixon was a simpler name, he said. The dairy cows that once gave Dixon the nickname The Dairy City are for the most part gone, though the Heritage Dairy is located a few miles from town. But Dixon is located amid the Dixon Ridge farming area of the Central Valley. The town’s agricultural heritage draws from some of Solano County’s most fertile soil where farmers grow everything from tomatoes to alfalfa, ranchers run cattle and sheep, and orchardists grow almonds and walnuts.
The annual May Fair, which began in the late 1800s and is the longest continually running agriculture fair in California, helps keep Dixon’s farming heritage alive. Fall brings such attractions as the Cool Pumpkin Patch corn maze. The Dixon Fairgrounds hosts year-round events. Solano County has a 548-acre area zoned for agricultural services next to Dixon. This area is to be home to processing plants and other businesses that help the farming economy. Dixon has become more suburban in recent decades, with subdivisions swelling its population of commuters who travel to Davis and the Sacramento area to work. The city was incorporated in 1878. Dixon almost became home to a major horse-racing center, but residents voted that down on the grounds they liked their town the way it was. The city also courted the idea of trying to land
a movie studio that would have been built on the south side of town and produce family films, but the studio never came about. But agriculture still looms large. Just look at the city seal, which portrays an orchard and rows of crops in the foreground and buildings in the distance. Dixon was born in 1851 when pioneer Elija Silvey founded the town of Silveyville, which was located a few miles from present-day Dixon. He set up a hotel and saloon for mule teams traveling between San Francisco and the gold fields in the Sierra Nevada and put up a red lantern to make certain people could find it. By 1865, Silveyville had about 150 residents and boasted a store, blacksmith shop and a post office, with Silvey serving as postmaster. But the Central Pacific railroad came through in 1868 several miles away and Silveyville died. A new town sprung up along the
Contact: Dixon Chamber of Commerce, 707-678-2650, www.dixonchamber.org. SUMMER 2022
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