Livermore is a wine region, a ranching valley and a nuclear weapons laboratory occupying the same twelve square miles, and there is no other town in California attempting that combination. It shouldn't work as a place. It does.
How it got here
The land was Rancho Las Positas — about 48,000 acres granted in 1839 to Robert Livermore, an English merchant sailor who jumped ship, became a Mexican citizen and married into a Californio family, along with Jose Noriega. Before that it was Mission San José grazing land.
The town proper was platted in 1869 by William Mendenhall as a stop on the railroad and incorporated on April 1, 1876. Downtown still runs along First Street, on that original railroad-town grid.
The economic history is stranger than the wine-country branding suggests. Before and alongside the vineyards there was wheat, cattle, oil, commercial rose growing, and coal — there were working coal mines out at Corral Hollow from roughly 1895 to 1905. Livermore has been several different towns on the same ground.
The wine part, which is older than you think
Both Wente and Concannon were founded here in 1883. That makes this valley some of the oldest continuously worked wine ground in California — going before Napa was Napa, and still going.
Wente is still operated by the founding family and still open to visit, with the tasting lounge, restaurant and golf course out on Tesla Road.
Concannon is in the middle of a significant change and it's worth knowing before you drive out. The estate and the brand have been separated and sold to different owners — the vineyard property to one family winery, which is replanting a large share of the acreage and converting the grounds toward events, and the Concannon name itself to another local producer. The 1883 heritage is real. What you'll actually find there right now is in transition, so check before you go.
The wider claim you'll hear locally — that Livermore clones account for a huge share of California's Chardonnay vine stock, that a Livermore white won America's first international wine medal in Paris in 1889 — comes mostly from the valley's own winegrowers association. It may well be true. We'd rather tell you where it comes from than repeat it as settled.
The bulb
In Fire Station 6, at 4550 East Avenue, there is a hand-blown carbon-filament light bulb that has been burning more or less continuously since 1901.
It moved to its current station in 1976 — under police escort, which is exactly the right way to move a light bulb. In July 2026 it passed 125 years and roughly 1.5 million hours. Guinness recognizes it as the longest-burning bulb in the world. It has a webcam.
People drive out of their way to look at a light bulb hanging from a fire station ceiling, and honestly, they should. It is a very small, very stubborn thing that has outlasted every technology sent to replace it.
The lab
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory opened in 1952 and is still the largest employer in town by a wide margin — something like seventeen percent of the local workforce. It is a nuclear weapons design laboratory, and it also does climate modelling, supercomputing and fusion research at a scale almost nowhere else does.
The practical effect on the town is that Livermore has an unusual density of physicists per capita, and a lot of them grow grapes on the weekend.
The element
Here is the fact most residents don't know about their own town.
Element 116 on the periodic table is livermorium, symbol Lv. It was named for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and confirmed by the international chemistry body in 2011.
There is a town in the East Bay with an element named after it. There are not many places on Earth that can say that.
Where it stands now
Livermore roughly tripled in population between 1970 and 2000 as the Bay Area pushed east, and sat near 88,000 at the last census. The median home sale price was around $1.1 million in mid-2026 and has been drifting down rather than up — one of the few East Bay markets currently softening.
Downtown First Street rebuilt itself over the last two decades into somewhere worth walking, with the theater and the restaurants and the tasting rooms that make a wine town feel like one. Del Valle is fifteen minutes south for the water. The hills turn gold in May and stay that way until the rains, which is the actual color of this valley for most of the year.
Rep the town: the Livermore collection has our California bear flag design made for Livermore on shirts, hoodies, hats, mugs, wine glasses and more. Around the Tri-Valley and the 680: Pleasanton, San Ramon and Danville.