Building A Better Bay Area: Fun facts about Fremont

FREMONT, Calif. (KGO) -- For the past month, ABC7 News has been embedded in the City of Fremont and this week we'll bring you stories about their solutions to problems we're all facing.

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Fremont has some fascinating history. The first thing to know about the city, it's huge: Nearly 92 square miles. That is nearly twice the square footage of San Francisco. In terms of population, Fremont is the fourth largest city in the Bay Area.

It's also relatively new. Fremont wasn't officially formed until 1956, more than 100 years after San Jose. Five separate towns, Centerville, Niles, Mission San Jose, Warm Springs and Irvington, merged into one.

That said, life has been there for years. Fremont made headlines a few years back when a trove of ice age fossils of extinct animals dating back almost two million years was unearthed by a construction crew working in the city. Decades earlier in the 1940's, a group of young boys also found similar fossils.

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Today, Fremont is known for a few reasons. One, it's extraordinarily diverse. It has the country's largest Afghan population. Second, it's a hub for tech manufacturing. It's where Apple made its first Mac computers and where Tesla has its main factory, which remains the city's largest employer.

Film-buffs might tell you, it's also known for something else. Several silent movies were filmed in Fremont in the early 1900's, including five Charlie Chaplin films. Remember "The Tramp"? Yep, filmed in Fremont. Chaplin didn't live in the area long, history says he didn't really like it, but still he left his mark. The city has a museum dedicated to the history of silent films and an annual Charlie Chaplin celebration.

A pretty cool claim to fame, even now, in modern times.

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