About Davis

Davis is the most populous city in Yolo County, California. Located in the Sacramento Valley region of Northern California, the city had a population of 66,850 in 2020, not including the on-campus population of the University of California, Davis, which was over 9,400 (not including students' families) in 2016. As of 2019, there were 38,369 students enrolled at the university. == History == Davis sits on land that originally belonged to the Indigenous Patwin, a southern branch of Wintun people, who were killed or forced from their lands by the 1830s as part of the California Genocide through a combination of mass murders, smallpox and other diseases, and both Mexican and American systems of Indigenous slavery. Patwin burial grounds have been found across Davis, including on the site of the UC Davis Mondavi Center. After the killing and expulsion of the Patwin, territory that eventually became Davis emerged from one of California's most complicated, corrupt land grants, Laguna de Santos Callé. The 1852 Land Commission concurred with US Attorneys who argued that the grant was "fraudulent in all its parts," and in his 1860 District Court ruling Justice Ogden Hoffman observed that "It is impossible to contemplate without disgust the series of perjuries which compose the record" of the land grant. Nevertheless, Jerome C. Davis, a prominent farmer and one of the early claimants to land in Laguna de Santos Callé, lobbied all the way to the United States Congress in order to retain the land that eventually became Davis. Davis became a depot on the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1868, when it was named "Davisville" after Jerome C. Davis. However, the post office at Davisville shortened the town name to "Davis" in 1907.