Guide to Fremont’s historical landmarks

By Staff Writers Eleanor Chen, Kayla Li & Mansi Mundada

Introduction

Walk down Niles Boulevard on a quiet afternoon,  and it is easy to miss the small theater tucked where the street bends toward Niles Canyon Road. But over a century ago, this stretch of Fremont was a film set — and the man walking through it was Charlie Chaplin, filming five movies in ten weeks. That legacy lives on at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum. 

The city’s artistic history extends beyond film into landscape and design. Sites like Fremont landmarks like Shinn Historical Park and California Nursery Historical Park show a different type of creative legacy rooted in historic architecture and preserved gardens and natural spaces. The artistic history of Fremont runs deeper than most residents realize, and it is still being written.

Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum

Before Hollywood existed as we know it, Fremont was already making movies. In January 1915, Charlie Chaplin arrived at Essanay Studios in Niles, directing multiple movies, including The Tramp — a movie whose melancholy and humor would define comedy for a generation. 

The museum is housed in the original Edison Theater, which — before being repurposed into the museum  —was a historic movie theater that was just half a block from the former site of Niles Essanay Studios where Chaplin filmed in the 1910s. Inside, classic movie posters hang in frames such as the 1913 film poster for Signal Lights and antique silent film cameras stand like sentinels guarding the films and memorabilia with the archive behind them holding roughly 10,000 silent films. 

For museum volunteer Michael Bonham, that local connection is what makes the site matter. “Not every city can say there was a movie studio here in town,” Bonham said. Preserving that history keeps Fremont connected to a chapter of film history most cities never had.

Shinn Historical Park & Arboretum

Fremont’s artistic identity has never been limited to film. In 1856, James and Lucy Shinn, who came to manage a 250-acre ranch for Lucy’s brother, settled along Alameda Creek, and the four acres that remain of their ranch is now Shinn Historical Park & Arboretum. 

The 1876 redwood Victorian house at its center is surrounded by rare trees and plants collected from around the world such as the Morton Bay Fig and Gingko, and has drawn photographers, painters, and historians for decades such as architectural historian Michael Corbett and photographer Scott Capen. Today, the site remains one of Fremont’s preserved historical properties and is maintained by volunteers and the City of Fremont.

California Nursery Historical Park

Long before Fremont had streets, it had this land. The grounds of California Nursery Historical Park were home to the Muwekma Ohlone, then Spanish missionaries, then Mexican rancheros, before becoming one of California’s most significant commercial nurseries in 1884 with its major role as the center of agricultural activity and plant cultivation. 

Today the park preserves some of the site’s remaining historic buildings, its rich collection of trees, and artifacts and documents all tended to by volunteers from those periods. One of the site’s most recognizable structures is the Vallejo Adobe, a Spanish-style clay adobe building dating back to the mid-1800s that remains from the ranchero period.

. “When I was young, I used to come here after school; it’s a quiet place. There’s a lot of trees, and . . . you can come [and] take a look at different birds when they chirp here, because it’s quite nice,” Fremont resident Nagris said. Surrounded by newer development, the park remains one of the city’s few preserved connections to Fremont’s earlier history.