Vallejo highlight
Historic waterfront
The U.S. Navy established Mare Island, the first naval installation on the West Coast, in 1854, and over the next 142 years the shipyard built more than 500 vessels.
Mare Island sits in the Mare Island Strait at Vallejo's northern waterfront, purchased by the United States Navy in 1853 and developed as a naval shipyard beginning in 1854 under Commander David Glasgow Farragut. The facility was built to support Pacific naval operations during a period of westward expansion and grew into one of the largest and most productive shipyards in the world. Between its founding and closure in 1996, Mare Island Naval Shipyard constructed more than 500 naval vessels, from early steam gunboats to nuclear-powered submarines.
The shipyard's legacy includes the USS California, a battleship launched in 1919 whose launching day became part of Vallejo history when the vessel's restraining cables snapped and the ship crossed the Mare Island Strait to crash into a Vallejo dock. The facility also produced the USS Ward, which fired the first shots of World War II for the United States Navy. In its final decades as an active shipyard, Mare Island became the leading submarine base on the West Coast, and the yard's 142-year operational history shaped Vallejo's identity as a naval and industrial center.
The waterfront location that made Mare Island a strategic military asset also shaped the families who settled in Vallejo to support those operations. Planning for those families is what term life insurance is for—a policy sized to a mortgage, to the years until children are independent, to the income a family would miss. Vallejo's waterfront continues to evolve, and so do the needs of the households who live there.