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 greater than 9,400 (not including students’ families) in 2016. As of 2019, there were 38,369 students enrolled at the university.

Davis sits upon 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 allowance of the California Genocide through a incorporation of lump murders, smallpox and supplementary 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 house grants, Laguna de Santos Callé. The 1852 Land Commission concurred taking into account US Attorneys who argued that the assent was “fraudulent in all its parts,” and in his 1860 District Court ruling Justice Ogden Hoffman observed that “It is impossible to contemplate without repugnance the series of perjuries which compose the record” of the estate grant. Nevertheless, Jerome C. Davis, a prominent farmer and one of the to come claimants to estate in Laguna de Santos Callé, lobbied whatever the showing off to the United States Congress in order to maintain the home 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 reveal office at Davisville condensed the town declare to “Davis” in 1907. The broadcast stuck, and the city of Davis was incorporated upon March 28, 1917.

From its inception as a farming community, Davis is known primarily for its contributions to agricultural policy along in the same way as veterinary care and animal husbandry. Following the alleyway of the University Farm Bill in 1905 by the California State Legislature, Governor George Pardee fixed Davis out of 50 extra sites as the future house to the University of California’s University Farm, officially launch to students in 1908. The farm, later renamed the Northern Branch of the College of Agriculture in 1922, was upgraded to become the seventh UC general campus, the University of California, Davis, in 1959.

Davis is located in Yolo County, California, 11 mi (18 km) west of Sacramento, 70 mi (113 km) northeast of San Francisco, 385 mi (619 km) north of Los Angeles, at the intersection of Interstate 80 and State Route 113. Neighboring towns intensify Dixon, Winters, Woodland, and West Sacramento.