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Introduction
Welcome Letter
Essay on Early History
Essay on Economic Development
Essay on Bay Area Architecture
Essay on Preservation
List of Sites
Begin the Tour
Learn More
Credits

Introduction

The National Park Service's National Register of Historic Places, in cooperation with the City of Santa Clara, the California Office of Historic Preservation, and the National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers (NCSHPO), proudly invite you to explore Santa Clara County: California's Historic Silicon Valley. Located south of the San Francisco Bay between the Santa Cruz Mountains and the Diablo or Mount Hamilton Range, the history of Santa Clara County is rich with stories of Spanish and Mexican settlement, the romance of the Gold-Rush era, the pastoral beauty of abundant orchards, of post-war suburbanization, the race to the moon, and the invention of the silicon chip. To help commemorate the City of Santa Clara's Sesquicentennial, this itinerary highlights 28 places listed in the National Register of Historic Places that illustrate how this fertile valley blossomed from a series of small agricultural towns linked by the Southern Pacific railroad into the center of the technology revolution that brought immense growth and prosperity in the 20th century.

The itinerary features a wide variety of historic buildings, from adobe pueblos to the Art Deco De Anza Hotel, from the eclectic Victorian architecture of the 160-room Winchester House to the International style home of President Herbert Hoover. The early Spanish-Mexican colonial history of Santa Clara County is represented by the 1837 Jose Maria Alviso Adobe, while the first mining operation in California, New Almaden, reflects the draw of the Gold Rush. The historic districts of San Jose and Los Gatos reflect the growth of the late 19th and 20th centuries. The prosperity of the agricultural industry was fostered by the arrival of the railroad, and the county still has several historic train stations such as the Santa Clara Depot, the oldest operating railroad depot in California. The California wine industry had an early start in Santa Clara County, fostered by European immigrants, at places such as the Picchetti Brothers Winery and Paul Masson's Mountain Winery, where every summer thousands of music lovers gather for the Music in the Vineyards Concerts. Technological innovations in the valley began with the military at Moffett Field, but were fostered by advanced research taking place at Stanford University and new private industries locating here. The innovative development of electronic devices such as the radio and amplifier, followed by the new material of silicon, the microchip, and the home computer led to the term "Silicon Valley." Recently Sun Microsystems renovated the former Agnew Insane Asylum, the first modern mental hospital in California, to create a campus-like setting for its operations.

Santa Clara County: California's Historic Silicon Valley offers several ways to discover the historic properties that played important roles in the valley's past. Each highlighted property features a brief description of the place's significance; color and, where available, historic photographs; and public accessibility information. At the bottom of each page the visitor will find a navigation bar containing links to four essays that explain more about Early History, Economic Development, Bay Area Architecture and Preservation. These essays provide historic background, or "contexts," for many of the places included in the itinerary. The itinerary can be viewed online, or printed out if you plan to visit Santa Clara County in person.

Created through a partnership between the National Park Service's National Register of Historic Places, the City of Santa Clara, the California Office of Historic Preservation, and NCSHPO, Santa Clara County: California's Historic Silicon Valley is the latest example of a new and exciting cooperative project. As part of the Department of the Interior's strategy to revitalize communities by promoting public awareness of history and encouraging tourists to visit historic places throughout the nation, the National Register of Historic Places is cooperating with communities, regions and heritage areas throughout the United States to create online travel itineraries. Using places listed in the National Register of Historic Places, the itineraries help potential visitors plan their next trip by highlighting the amazing diversity of the country's historic places and supplying accessibility information for each featured site. In the Learn More section, the itineraries link to regional and local web sites that provide visitors with further information regarding cultural events, special activities, lodging and dining possibilities, as well as histories of the region. Visitors may be intersted in Historic Hotels of America, a program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, located near Santa Clara County, including the Hotel Saint Clare, one of the places featured in this itinerary.

Santa Clara County is the 14th of more than 30 partners working directly with the National Register of Historic Places to create travel itineraries. Additional itineraries will debut online in the future. The National Register of Historic Places and the City of Santa Clara hope you enjoy this virtual travel itinerary of the county's historic places. If you have comments or questions please just click on the provided e-mail address, "comments or questions" located at the bottom of each page.

Welcome

Dear Visitor,

Welcome. We invite you to explore our City, and the surrounding metropolitan area which is rich in history. After your virtual tour, we would be delighted if you find time one day to visit us in person as well. On your trip there are many wonderful places to stay, delicious food to eat, and great places to shop.

Just minutes from the San Jose International Airport, Santa Clara is less than an hour south of San Francisco and just over an hour north of Monterey. Santa Clara is California's Silicon Valley Central, the heart of the Valley. The perfect setting for conventions, meetings, and vacations, Santa Clara is home to a state-of-the art Convention Center, 100-acre theme park, high-tech museum, historic mission, shopping, golf and tennis clubs, and much more.

Fertile soil, level land, abundant water, a temperate climate and a central location within the San Francisco Bay region have combined to form a pleasant and productive living environment in the City of Santa Clara throughout its long history.

The first written record of the area is from 1769 when the scouts of Juan Gasparde Portola's Spanish expedition reported grassy plains spotted with oak trees and numerous Indian villages. On January 12, 1777, Padre de la Pena offered the first Mass of the Mission Santa Clara under a shelter of tree branches. The Mission prospered and was rebuilt in 1779, 1784, 1819, 1825 and finally in 1926 where it stands today, on the campus of Santa Clara University. The Spaniards found the valley floor ideal for vast herds of cattle and sheep which were raised primarily for hides and tallow. During the early 19th century, the agricultural emphasis shifted from cattle to grain production.

Following California's entry into the Union in 1850, Santa Clara began to lay the foundation for its transition from a rural town to a city. In 1851, the Jesuits founded Santa Clara University with a faculty of two and 15 students. Soon after, in 1852, Santa Clara was incorporated as a charter city under the provisions of the State Constitution. The City officially platted a street system in 1866 to accommodate anticipated growth. This layout still exists in the Old Quad district.

Around 1870, Santa Clara began to take on regional and even national significance. The two developments most responsible for this were (1) the prosperity and academic achievements of the University and, (2) the transition to an orchard economy. By 1940, Santa Clara supported a population of 6,700 and was known as the prune capital of the world.

During World War II, industry began to locate in the City and develop for the first time an economy not subject to seasonable employment. It was the start of a tremendous immigration of population and industry to Santa Clara. The full effect of the massive urbanization generated by the growth of the Bay region and local employment opportunities was felt in the decade of the 1950s. Led by industry, all other sectors of the economy expanded rapidly, initiating a growth cycle that has yet to culminate. Between 1950 and 1960, the City's population increased by 403 percent.

One of the things in which we take particular pride is our City's commitment to its historic heritage. We invite you to enjoy the virtual tour and to take time to visit our web site at www.ci.santa-clara.ca.us

Sincerely,

Patricia M. Mahan, Mayor
Santa Clara, California

Early History

The physical geography of Santa Clara County, situated between the Santa Cruz Mountains to the west and the Diablo Mountain Range to the east, was formed quite recently in geological history. Santa Clara Valley was created by the sudden growth of the Santa Cruz Mountains and the Diablo Mountain Range, during the later Cenozoic era. This was a period of intense mountain building in California when the folding and thrusting of the earth's crust, combined with active volcanism, gave shape to the present state of California. Hence, Santa Clara Valley is a structural valley, created by mountain building, as opposed to an erosional valley, or one which has undergone the wearing away of the earth's surface by natural agents. The underlying geology of the Santa Cruz Mountains was also formed by the sediment of the ancient seas, where marine shale points to Miocene origin. Today one can still find evidence of this in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where shark's teeth and the remains of maritime life are still found as high as Scott's Valley, a city nestled in the mountains.

The Santa Cruz Mountains and Diablo Mountain Range created a sheltered valley. Located south of the San Francisco Bay, Santa Clara Valley offered shelter from the cold, damp climate of the San Francisco region and coastal areas west of the Santa Cruz Mountains, and was no doubt inviting to the first human inhabitants. Historically, the Tamien-speaking Ohlone Indians were the first documented inhabitants of the Santa Clara Valley region, although the oak lined hills and valley undoubtedly had known earlier Indian inhabitants and migrations, now lost to history and prehistory. Archeological discoveries place Ohlone Indian settlements in the region as early as 8000 BC.

Sometime around 4000 years ago, according to anthropologists, the ancestral Ohlone, along with the culturally interrelated people of the greater Sacramento/ San Joaquim Delta regions, developed a system of social ranking and institutional religions. Within the greater San Francisco Bay region, people of social prominence were interred in what has become known as the "shellmounds." The Smithsonian-based anthropological linguist J.P. Harrington, working in the Ohlone region from 1921-1939 with the last fluent elderly speakers of the Ohlone languages, preserved what is now known about the earliest known inhabitants of Santa Clara Valley. From his interviews with Angela Colos and Jose Guzman, Muwkema elders of the Federally Recognized Verona Band of Alameda County, he learned that "the Clareños [Santa Clara Valley Ohlones] were much intermarried with the Chocheños [East Bay speaking Ohlones]. Aside from the Ohlone, who are also considered Costanoan speaking tribal groups, the Bay Miwok and Yokut peoples dwelt to the east in parts of modern Contra Costa and San Joaquin counties. The northern San Francisco Bay was home to both the Coast Miwok and Patwin speaking tribal groups, and other tribes who lived in the surrounding regions. Descendants of Santa Clara's original Ohlone inhabitants are still in the region today and are enrolled members of the present-day Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay.

The European presence in the region began with the English explorer and privateer Sir Francis Drake, who landed on July 17,1579, in the San Francisco Bay Area and claimed the region for England. After Drake's departure it took nearly two centuries before any European power settled the region. The arrival of the Spanish to "Llano de los Robles"-Plain of the Oaks-started when Russian exploration into California alarmed the Spanish Viceroy in Mexico City. The Russians had settled Alaska and were exploring the West Coast for trading posts within striking distance of the rich Spanish mines. They were a presence at Fort Ross in Northern California from 1812-1841. José de Gálvez, the visitor-general of New Spain (Mexico), wanted to increase New Spain's territory for the Spanish crown. He sent the Spanish forward into Alta California (present day California). Encountering the native Ohlone people, the Spanish gave them the name of Costeños, or People of the Coast. José Francisco Ortega gave Santa Clara the name "Llano de los Robles" in 1769 as he scouted the region on the behalf of Captain Gaspar de Portola. On April 2, 1776, near the Carquinez Straits (North-East Bay), Father Font documented the following account of an early encounter between the Spanish and the Ohlone:

We set out from the little arroyo at seven o'clock in the morning, and passed through a village to which we were invited by some ten Indians, who came to the camp very early in the morning singing. We were welcomed by the Indians of the village, whom I estimated at some four hundred persons, with singular demonstrations of joy,singing, and dancing.

Father Junípero Serra also came into present-day California, establishing a chain of Franciscan missions. It was in 1777 that Father Serra gave Santa Clara Valley its lasting name when he consecrated the Mission Santa Clara de Asis. The 8th of the 21 established missions, Mission Santa Clara de Asis claimed land from San Francisquito Creek in present day Palo Alto to Llagas Creek at Gilroy.

San Jose was California's first town. On November 29, 1777, on orders from the Spanish viceroy of Mexico, nine soldiers, five pobladores (settlers) with their families, and one cowboy were detailed to found the Pueblo de San Jose de Guadalupe, named in honor of St. Joseph. The already existing Spanish Catholic missions were not pleased with this, but could do nothing to stop it. By 1825, Mission Santa Clara de Asis, standing where the University of Santa Clara stands today, offered rest for the travelers from Monterey and San Francisco. Phyllis Filiberti Butler, in The Valley of Santa Clara Historic Buildings, 1792-1920, states "The pardon of 1825 showed 1,450 devout souls at Santa Clara, most of whom were Indian neophytes." Although Mexico broke with the Spanish crown in 1821, it was not until May 10, 1825, that San Jose acknowledged Mexican rule. The Mexican government soon began selling off church lands in a process known as "secularization." Although originally intended to return church lands to the native population, this practice soon entailed a selling of church lands to the highest bidders. By 1839 only 300 Indians remained at the Mission Santa Clara de Asis. The time of the Mexican dons, comprised of the rural land owning gentlemen, was short lived in California, however. American immigrants began arriving in California, followed by the Mexican-American War.

On May 13, 1846, the United States declared war on Mexico. Captain Thomas Fallon, leading 19 men, entered San Jose on July 14, 1846, and raised the United States flag over the town hall. San Jose consisted of a small town of Spanish Californians, Mexicans, Peruvians, Chileans, and Indians. After the completion of the Mexican-American war, in 1848, California, along with most of the western states, was added to the United States, first as a territory, but later as a state on September 9, 1850. In addition to the change of government, the discovery of gold in 1848 in a gravel bed of the American River altered Santa Clara's political landscape. Suddenly swarms of immigrants arrived in California, looking to strike quick fortunes. The Gold Rush changed San Jose, which became a supply city for the numerous miners arriving in California. Many residents, alarmed by the arrival of so many Americans into the valley, fled to Mission Santa Clara. The Catholic bishop of California took an interest in the location, and by 1851 the Jesuits had set up the first college in the new State--Santa Clara University, on the rebuilt site of the old mission.

San Jose became the first Capital of the State of California and the first California Legislature convened there on December 15, 1849. A referendum was sent to the people, to determine where to permanently locate the Capital. Vallejo, San Jose and Monterey vied for the honor, and Vallejo initially won. After several more moves the capital was permanently established in Sacramento. The name Santa Clara was given to the county by the new state legislature in 1850. Other towns began to spring up in Santa Clara County after the gold rush. In 1852 Santa Clara became a town with duly elected trustees. The city of Mountain View is reported to have received its name when Jacob Shumway, a storekeeper, looked across the valley eastward and poetically named the place where he was standing "Mountain View." In September of 1855 a small town, originally named McCarthysville, but later named Saratoga, came into existence 12 miles west of San Jose at the base of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Saratoga became famous for its wine and spa, while Cupertino, which possessed a post office by 1882 and named after the original Spanish name for Steven's Creek, Arroyo de San Josè Cupertino, was famous for horse breeding. Los Gatos was formed from land originally owned by the British vice-consul to Mexican California, James Alexander Forbes. When Forbes went bankrupt, many pioneer lumbermen came down to the banks of Los Gatos creek and established the nucleus of the town. Gilroy, in the southern part of the county, was named after British settler John Gilroy, who wed Maria Clara, granddaughter of the man who claimed San Francisco for Spain in 1769. In 1849 Martin Murphy, Jr. controlled six of Santa Clara's largest ranchos. After Murphy's death real estate developer W.E. Crossman purchased 200 acres of orchard land, which eventually became Sunnyvale in 1901. Palo Alto's original townsite was laid out in 1888 from land owned by Rafael Soto. It was here in the 1890s that California Senator Leland Stanford established the Leland Stanford Junior University in Palo Alto. The railroads soon followed the establishment of Palo Alto and the university. Paul Shoup, a Southern Pacific executive, spotted a good site for a township and organized the Altos Land Company. By 1908, the railroad began service and Los Altos filled up with buyers.

Santa Clara County was linked to the world by the railroads, and despite a rapid population growth since 1850, the county retained her natural beauty. Agricultural success in the Santa Clara Valley was fostered by access to distant markets that the railroad made possible. This, combined with the discovery that artesian well water underlay the whole valley, created the conditions for the sudden wealth to be found in the agricultural business. Santa Clara County was soon producing carrots, almonds, tomatoes, prunes, apricots, plums, walnuts, cherries, and pears for the world market. With the establishment of seed farms in the last half of the 1870s, a new aspect of the agricultural business began. The Charles Copeland Morse Residence is an example of the wealth to be found in the seed business. Santa Clara Valley was also experimenting with other sources of income. Oil wells once dotted the valley, and from 1866 until the discovery of other sources in 1880, the county produced nearly all of California's oil. Lumber also played a part in the county's economy; the town of Santa Clara saw the Pacific Manufacturing Company producing such items as Cyclone windmills and coffins. This company eventually became the largest manufacturer of wood products on the West Coast. Several wineries, such as the Picchetti Brothers Winery and the Paul Masson Mountain Winery were operating, and the area southwest of Cupertino was a winemaking region for years. Santa Clara County, with its farms, orchards and ranches remained largely rural and agricultural until after World War II. John Muir, the renown conservationist, testified to the rural beauty of the county, writing in 1868: "It was bloom time of the year . . .The landscapes of the Santa Clara Valley were fairly drenched with sunshine, all the air was quivering with the songs of meadowlarks, and the hills were so covered with flowers that they seemed to be painted."

The 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which struck at 5:16 AM on the morning of April 18, shook San Francisco to its foundations, destroying its business district and taking over 700 lives. Nearby Santa Clara County also received reverberations from the quake, which was felt as far away as Los Angeles, Oregon, and Nevada. It is also said locally that the Landrum House was one of the few buildings in Santa Clara whose chimney did not crumble in the earthquake of 1906. The Paul Masson's Mountain Winery was rebuilt after the earthquake, using sandstone blocks from the Saratoga Wine Company's building on Big Basin Way, also destroyed in the great quake. While Santa Clara County recovered from the quake, the later changes that the new century ushered in would have a much more dramatic effect on the valley and the world.

Much of the information for this essay was found in Phyllis Filiberti Butler's, The Valley of Santa Clara Historic Buildings, 1792-1920 (with architectural supplement by the Junior League of San Jose). San Jose: Presidio Press, 1975. Also helpful was the Federal Writers' Project book, California: A Guide to the Golden State. New York: Hastings House, 1939. For an overall view of Spanish/Mexican history in the west, Howard R. Lamar's (editor) The New Encyclopedia of the American West. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998 was helpful. On local Santa Clara history, the book draft of Lorie Garcia's manuscript for The City of Santa Clara Sequicentennial Book was helpful. Information on the Ohlone Indians was found at The Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area in a history essay by Rosemary Cambra (Tribal Chair), Monica V. Arellano (Tribal Vice Chairwoman), Hank Alvarez (Tribal Councilman), Gloria E. Arellano (Tribal Councilwoman), Carolyn M. Sullivan (Tribal Councilwoman), Karl Thompson (Tribal Councilman), Concha Rodriguez (Tribal Councilwoman), and Alan Leventhal (Tribal Ethnohistorian). This was found at http://www.muwekma.org/

Economic Development

Prior to World War II the economy of Santa Clara County was tied to agriculture. By 1939 San Jose, with a population of 57, 651, was the largest canning and dried-fruit packing center in the world, with 18 canneries, 13 dried-fruit packing houses, and 12 fresh-fruit and vegetable shipping firms. San Jose also served as a distribution point for the prune and apricot industry. Already, however, new technologies were developing--San Jose was one of the first California cities to create industries for making all the mechanical equipment for specialized farming. California: A Guide to the Golden State, written by the Federal Writers' Project, gives a descriptive version of the Santa Clara Valley in 1939, stating "US 101 cuts through the fruit trees that sweep in row on row across Santa Clara Valley. . . Now in the spring, from the foothills of its mountain walls-the Mount Hamilton Range on the east and the Santa Cruz Mountains on the west-it looks more like an expanse of snowdrifts because of the orchards white with blossoms." Today, those orchards are gone. What happened?

As early as the 1890's, when California Senator Leland Stanford established the Leland Stanford Junior University in Palo Alto, the changes were beginning which would create Silicon Valley. Palo Alto became, in the early twentieth century, a testing ground for radio equipment, and later the locale for development of continuous-wave transmission powered by arc generators, largely the work of Cyril Elwell. Elwell employed a radio research team that included Lee de Forest, who had invented a three-element vacuum tube in New York. In 1912 this team discovered that the tube could be rigged as an amplifier, which was a major breakthrough for long distance telephone and radio use. Later radar, television and computer systems would benefit from this discovery. By 1912 San Jose was receiving the first regularly scheduled radio broadcasts. Palo Alto was a technical beacon. It was here that the Federal Telegraph Company, created by Elwell, created ocean-spanning networks, which supplied US Naval communications during World War I.

Already in the 1930s the US military saw the strategic advantages of Santa Clara Valley. Admiral William A. Moffett, appointed by President Harding on July 25, 1924, as the first Chief of the Naval Bureau of Aeronautics, believed a naval aviation presence on the West Coast necessary for the nation's security. In the 1920s Moffett was fascinated with the lighter than air technology of the dirigibles (self-propelled airships whose buoyancy is provided by gasbags containing helium or hydrogen). Northern California politicians, realizing the opportunities to be created, seized the initiative from San Diego, and money was found to purchase the 1,750 acres of what would become US Naval Air Station Moffett Field, also known as the United States Naval Air Station Sunnyvale, California Historic District. Two Naval Air Stations were commissioned in the early 1930's to port the two US naval airships (dirigibles). Hangar #1, built in 1932 and designed to house the USS Macon, remains one of the two largest structures in the United States without internal support. The military presence in the Bay Area in Northern California increased during World War II. On August 9, 1945, the same day the press recorded the second atomic bomb, dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, the San Jose Mercury Herald ran a front-page article under the headline Building Code Aims Listed which stated: "At least 60 percent of the county's wartime influx of people is expected to remain after hostilities cease, giving the county an estimated 210,000 population."

The growth of post World War II suburban development in the valley caused the disappearance of the orchards. Sunnyvale, which in 1939 was described as "a quiet ranchers' trade center," with a population of 3,094, grew to a suburb with a population of over 107, 229 by 1990, a population rise of 10% in one decade (1980-1990). Santa Clara County was, by 2000, home to 1,682,585 and still growing. The city of Santa Clara, (1939 population 6,303), Mountain View, (1939 population 3,308) and other Santa Clara cities also grew to many times their 1939 population size. However, vestiges of the old orchards remained, throughout the county, and as late as 1970 San Jose was still classified as partly rural by the US census, although the city had a population of 443,950. By 1990 San Jose's population reached 782, 248 people, according to the US census, and was the 11th most populated city in the nation, surpassing San Francisco in population.

Santa Clara County's growing suburbs can be tied to nationwide trends. The advent of the automobile and larger freeways and highways helped in the creation of suburbs. By the 1920s a cultural reaction against Victorian architecture and the creation of the affordable bungalow also helped this trend, as the middle class could afford homes outside the cities. Already in the 1920s, suburban areas were growing at a faster rate than central cities and after World War II, the suburban population exploded nationwide. During the 1940s, core cities grew by an average of 14 percent while the suburbs grew by 36 percent. Returning World War II veterans, getting married and settling down produced a baby boom unprecedented in American history. Already by 1960 more metropolitan residents lived in the suburbs than in the central city, and by 1990 the majority of all Americans lived in suburban areas. With the shift from an agricultural county to a large suburban one, Santa Clara County was following national trends. Its next move, with the creation of Silicon Valley, would lead national trends in creating the computer revolution, which would sweep the nation and the world.

There are numerous reasons why Silicon Valley came into being. The early collaboration between Stanford professors and nearby industry aided the process. The increasing military presence, which began just before World War II, also contributed to this hi-tech corridor. Certainly America's defense spending during the Cold War Era, when research and development strove to keep abreast of the Soviet Union, helped. After the Soviet's launched the first man-made satellite, Sputnik in 1957, President Eisenhower created the Advance Research Projects Agency, which was part of the Department of Defense, in 1958. After launching the first successful US Satellite, the Advance Research Projects Agency turned its attention to the potential of computers. Aerospace companies were also at work in Santa Clara County, as America prepared to take the lead from Russia in manned space exploration. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had a presence at Moffett Field, in the U. S. Naval Air Station Historic District, Sunnyvale, California. It was here that studies were conducted in the 1960s to determine how firm the soil was on the moon for a landing. The impact history studies verified the shock history of the lunar rocks that had been hit by meteorites, which create very high pressures in the rocks, and made a more thorough geological history of the moon possible. The Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel, found at the Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, formed the foundation of the American effort to land a man on the moon. Constructed between 1950 and 1955, this complex actually contains three wind tunnels. It was used extensively to design and test new generations of aircraft, both commercial and military, as well as NASA space vehicles, including the space shuttle.

In response to Stanford University's financial problems around the mid-century, Professor Fred Terman of Stanford University's Department of Electrical Engineering leased parts of the university to high tech companies for 99 years, a move that is generally considered the start of the computer revolution in Santa Clara County. Professor Terman, concerned with the lack of economic opportunities for Stanford Engineering graduates in the area, was successful in bringing large businesses to invest in the area. Another Stanford professor, William Hansen, who taught physics, developed insights that were used by the Varian Brothers in the klystron tube and later in linear accelerators, which was useful in smashing atoms and treating cancer. Stanford University- educated microwave engineers helped with US technical breakthroughs in World War II as well as exploiting television and long-term communications. Locally in Palo Alto, as is recorded in The Making of Silicon Valley, Hewlett-Packard, named after Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, graduate electronic engineers from Stanford's class of 1934, became the dominant electronics company, "developing measuring equipment, scientific instruments, a programmable calculator, and ultimately computers, printers and other peripherals."

In 1947, William Shockley, leading a Bell Labs team, invented the transistor. Shockley returned home to his native Palo Alto and created Shockley Transistor. Differences arose within the company over the choice between the use of two semiconducting materials--silicon and germanium. Shockley preferred germanium, but his eight engineers believed silicon to be the superior semiconducting material. They left Shockley in 1957, forming Fairchild Semiconductor in Mountain View. Fairchild was the first company to manufacture exclusively in silicon, and to mass manufacture a micro-sized device able to integrate large numbers of electrical "on-off" switching functions, which were stored in simple memory cells, all etched onto a silicon chip.

Journalist Don C. Hoefler first coined the term "Silicon Valley" to describe the region in a series of articles he wrote for Electronic News, a weekly industrial tabloid, in 1971. Also in 1971, Intel created the first microprocessor, the 4004-chip. The next step in the Silicon valley revolution occurred in March 1975, when the Homebrew Computer Club in Menlo Park was created by students with an interest in technology and a desire to experiment with building home computers. Steve Wozniak, a founding member, built a home computer from a cheap microprocessor, and showed it to his fellow club members, who included his friend Steve Jobs. Together, in Steve Job's garage in Cupertino, Wozniak and Jobs formed Apple Computer. By 1976 the first Personal Computer - Apple I, was offered from Apple Computer.

Even after the recent dot.com crash, "about 4,000 IT-related companies located along Highway 101 from San Francisco to San Jose generate approximately $200 billion in IT-related revenue annually" reported Gregory R. Gromov, in The Roads and Crossroads of Internet History. Recently Sun Microsystems, an industry giant, renovated Agnews Insane Asylum, originally a series of buildings constructed in 1888 for the advanced and humane treatment of the mentally ill. Sun Microsystems invested $10 million in the restoration of key historic buildings on the property where it built its corporate headquarters and office/research and development space for more than 3,000 employees.

Silicon Valley's numerous inventions, scientific discoveries, adaptations, and developments placed Santa Clara County in the forefront of the information age. Ward Winslow's The Making of Silicon Valley records Santa Clara's contributions to civilization, including "Long Distance high-voltage transmission, the amplifying vacuum tube, the first commercial radio broadcast, long distance continuous-wave radio transmissions, mobile radio systems development, the klystron tube and microwave radar, electronic measuring devices, nuclear induction applications, the X-ray microscope, traveling-wave tube development, silicon crystal-growing, programmable handheld calculators, videotape and VCRs, development of the junction transistor, linear accelerators for particle physics research and cancer treatment." Other technical advances also occurred in the field of biotechnology, a new industry, springing from discoveries of gene-splicing and gene-cloning at the Bay Area Universities. The local four-year colleges and two-year community colleges met the demands for supplying high technology companies with engineers. San Jose University leads the field in supplying these industries with more engineer graduates then all other colleges combined. Overall, Santa Clara County's scientific/commercial renaissance has, with justification, been compared to the earlier European renaissance. The creation of lasers, nuclear magnetic resonance, random access computer storage; disk drives, integrated circuits, personal computers, open-heart surgery, ink jet printing, gene-splicing and other wonders in such a short span of time has placed Santa Clara County firmly in history as a unique location whose creative energies have changed the world.

Much of the information for this article comes from editor Ward Winslow's draft of The Making of Silicon Valley. Santa Clara Valley Historical Association, 1995. Information for the 1945 growth of the county came from Hal Martin's article, "Building Code Aims Listed," in the front page of the San Jose Mercury Herald, 9 August 1945. Excellent online sources included Gregory R. Gromov's, History of Internet and WWW: The Roads and Crossroads of Internet History found at http://www.netvalley.com/intval.html. Another excellent source was Alexander Loudon's The History of Silicon Valley found at http://www.websofinnovation.com/svhistory.html. Material for the history of suburban growth in the United States comes from the draft manuscript of Linda McClelland and David. L. Ames, Guidelines for Evaluating and Documenting Historic Residential Suburbs found at http://www.nps.gov/history/pub/nr/ameweb2.doc

Bay Area Architecture

While idyllic images of California architecture usually involve Mediterranean red tiled roofs and white stucco walls or a rustic, sprawling ranch, true California architecture is more complex. Early Spanish and Mexican occupation of the area that is now California had a significant impact on the built environment that has evolved in the State over the past two centuries, but it was not the only influence. Eastern architects also migrated with the gold-seeking 49ers. These architects and east-coast immigrants brought with them contemporary Victorian tastes. Over time, other factors have influenced the architecture of the San Francisco Bay area, which today contains a fascinating variety of commercial, institutional, and domestic buildings.

Unlike other states, there are no architectural remains in California of construction that might have taken place prior to European colonization. The traditional architectural practices of both the Spanish, and later Mexican, immigrants were easily adopted in Alta California because of the moderate climate and abundance of the familiar adobe material. Adobe refers not only to the mud building material, but also the structure that was created with it. Adobe was the prevalent material used in the Bay Area through the gold-rush period, and there were no wooden-frame buildings in San Francisco until the 1830s. The building program of the Spanish colonialists began in 1769, with the establishment of the first mission (San Diego de Acalá) of what was to become a chain of 21 missions along the California coast. Construction of the missions was undertaken by the padres (monks) of each mission. The Santa Clara mission, the eighth mission established, was the work of a padre who had built extensively in Mexico for Father Junípero Serra, the influential Franciscan missionary who established nine early missions in California. Most missions were adobe with tile roofs with wide eaves to protect the walls from rain. Not long after the transfer of California to Mexican control in 1822, the Mission system was secularized and many of the missions were abandoned, plundered for building materials, and deteriorated quickly.

While the Franciscan missionaries were building their religious structures, secular construction was also taking place in the campaign for California settlement, specifically in the form of presidios, pueblos, and ranchos. The missionaries were accompanied by soldiers who established four presidios, or forts, from 1769 to 1782 in San Diego, Monterey, San Francisco, and Santa Barbara. Like the missions, the presidios were U-shaped fortified areas with an internal plaza. After the San Francisco presidio was established, the first of three pueblos, or towns, was also founded. The San Jose pueblo was established in 1777, followed by Los Angeles (1781), and Villa de Branciforte (1797). Pueblos were intended to increase the food supply and supplement the defenses offered by the presidios. The pueblos were also planned around a central plaza, included a chapel and other municipal buildings, covered walkways, adobe homes, and pastures. With time, the soldier-settlers became more interested in establishing their own ranchos outside of the presidios and pueblos. Secular society thrived around the pueblos and ranchos. These early Spanish settlers adopted the unofficial title of "Don" to distinguish themselves from those settlers arriving after Mexican independence. During this period the ranchos of the Dons were single-story, flat-roofed adobes, often without floors, chimneys, doors, or windows. Most flat-roofs of the ranchos, pueblos and presidios were asphalt or thatched.

In the 1830s a new style of architecture evolved in California that was a unification of these early Spanish-Mexican building practices and the New England architectural traditions that were familiar to the increasing number of American immigrants. The first of these buildings was constructed by Thomas Larkin in the trading port of Monterey, after which numerous Monterey Colonial houses were modeled throughout the State. Larkin introduced strong redwood timber framing that could support a second story, but adopted the adobe walls, and attached a two-story veranda to protect them. The Larkin House also introduced the eastern floor plan of two rooms on either side of a central hall. Today, the Jose Maria Alviso Adobe is the only remaining example of this prevalent style in the Santa Clara Valley and San Francisco Bay Area.

With the massive immigration to California that occurred during the mid-19th-century gold rush, some adopted the use of the abundant adobe building material before the establishment of lumbermills. Gold country was often a myriad of makeshift tents and some prefabricated woodframe shacks. But as soon as milled lumber and skilled carpenters were available, architectural styles popular throughout much of America during the last half of the 19th century were appearing in California as well. Among the gold-seekers were trained architects who established practices in California after gold-fever had subsided. They designed many sophisticated buildings in San Francisco, established a professional journal in the 1870s, called The California Architect and Building News, and a professional society by 1881. In contrast to these professionally-trained architects, a larger group of self-trained designers and carpenter-builders were also contributing to California's built environment, and designed the majority of Northern California homes. They depended heavily on popular design handbooks, and initially continued the Classical and Gothic Revival styles they were familiar with from the east and mid-west. From the 1860s through the 1870s, the vertical forms and asymmetrical floor plans of the Italianate style were popular. The Landrum House in Santa Clara is a hybrid example of these popular Gothic Revival and Italianate motifs. For the last three decades of the 19th century, Californians embraced the variety of decorative details found in the Victorian period, particularly Queen Anne ornamentation, such as that seen at the Charles Copeland Morse House, as this style easily made use of the abundance of native redwood. Examples can also be seen of Stick, Eastlake, Richardsonian Romanesque, Shingle, and the Renaissance Revival styles.

Mission Revival, popular all over the country after its introduction in 1893 at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, was particularly attractive to Californians looking for a simpler regional architecture. Romantic ideals of the Spanish-Mexican colonial period were prevalent, if not unfounded, and most every California town erected a red-tile, white stucco Mission Revival building often with neo-Moorish towers and round arches. Instead of adhering to early-19th century colonial California examples, the style was based more on Mediterranean traditions, as exemplified in the elaborate Villa Montalvo or the Hayes Mansion. These architectural motifs experienced renewed popularity throughout California, and the entire country, from the late 1910s through the 1930s as the Spanish Colonial Revival.

It was in Northern California that a new building material, reinforced concrete, was developed by Ernest Ransome, who constructed the first reinforced concrete building in America, the Arctic Oil Works, in San Francisco in 1884. Two decades later, the 1906 earthquake centered under San Francisco had a devastating effect on the entire Bay Area. Reinforced concrete became widely used thereafter to construct earthquake-safe buildings. San Jose's first "skyscraper," the Bank of America Building, was built in 1926 and is one of the first earthquake-proof buildings in the area. After the quake, damaged Victorian and Romanesque commercial buildings were generally replaced by popular 20th-century style buildings, such as Edwardian and Neo-Classical. The streetscape of Santa Clara Boulevard between Third and Fourth Streets in the San Jose Downtown Historic District is representative of this immediate post-earthquake design.

A new architectural ideal was also being embraced by many Californians in early 20th century--one which valued hand crafts over the machine-made, stained rather than painted wood, and the principle that "nothing is beautiful that is also not functional." One realization of these ideals was the Craftsman bungalow, a house form that was typically one to two stories with gently pitched broad gables, one large gable covering the main portion of the house and often a second, lower gable, covering a porch. Equally important was the interior arrangement of space, which eliminated hallways to create open floor plans and incorporated stained woodwork throughout. Californians were particularly receptive to craftsman ideas of integrating the house with its natural surroundings, possible, in part, because of the mild California climate and abundance of natural materials. The bungalow has been referred to as California's first architectural export, variations of which were adapted by communities around the country. Examples such as the Charles Wagner River Rock Bungalow can still be seen throughout the Bay Area today.

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, many professional architects were making their imprint on Northern California. Bernard Maybeck was one of several well-educated eastern architects to arrive in San Francisco in the 1890s. Maybeck joined the firm of A. Page Brown, San Francisco's leading pre-earthquake architect. By 1894 he had established a private practice in Berkeley, and began teaching at the University of California in Berkeley. Maybeck drew upon a wide variety of stylistic and regional inspirations, characterized by the use of shingles and stained wood. Maybeck's clients were cultural leaders and professors, and his Sunbonnet House in the Professorville Historic District in Palo Alto is typical of his work. He was the center of the Craftsman movement in the Bay Area and an important mentor to a number of young architects, such as Julia Morgan, one of the nation's first prominent female architects. A native Californian, Morgan attended the University of California and the Ecolé des Beaux-Arts, after which she returned to the West Coast and soon established her own practice in San Francisco at age 32 in 1904. During her 46-year career, Morgan designed nearly 800 buildings, including homes, schools, churches, women's clubs and other small institutional buildings throughout California and the West, but primarily in the San Francisco Bay area. Her buildings incorporated practicality, convenience and elegant simplicity. Along with Maybeck, Morgan helped formulate a style specific to the Bay Area which blended the building with the landscape, used wood for both interior and exterior finishes, incorporated numerous windows, courtyards, porches and large spaces that conveyed an open, natural, informal feel.

Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the most enigmatic and influential architects of the 20th century, was also practicing in Northern California. Wright experimented with an innovative hexagonal design in his Hanna Honeycomb House. Patterned after the honeycomb of a bee, the house incorporates a series of six-sided figures in its plan, terraces, and built-in furnishings. However, his Prairie style house, touted as the first indigenous American architecture and the basis of much modern design, had far wider reaching influence in California. Wright's typical prairie house was long and horizontal in form with low-pitched hip roofs and wide projecting eaves, a central portion of the house rising slightly higher than the flanking wings, with banks of windows and wide-open floor plans and large central hearth.

These American ideas of openness and the close relationship between interior and exterior spaces paved the way for a great deal of experimentation in architecture. By the mid-20th-century post-World War II building boom, Wright's ideas were meshed with those behind the bungalow and Modern movement into the emerging suburban ranch house. Throughout the Santa Clara Valley, acres of farmland were replaced by suburban developments, many of them dominated by the ranch house, often seen as a reflection of the informal nature of Western culture. These single-story, horizontal houses with low pitched gable roofs, rambling floorplans, and attached garages were like much of California's architecture--an evolution and combination of earlier styles. And like the bungalow, the Western Ranch house permeated suburban development around the country as the influence of California's architectural frontier spread beyond the boundaries of the golden state.

Preservation

Every community has its own history, and has weathered the tides of change. Santa Clara is no different. The transformation of Santa Clara from an agricultural town to a modern metropolitan city began in the 1950s and continued through the rest of the 20th century. As farms disappeared, one by one, residential subdivisions moved into the spaces that orchards occupied.

Santa Clara has experienced growing pains similar to many other cities. With urban sprawl, businesses and residents migrated to the fringes of the city. Santa Clara's downtown area experienced a significant decline during the last half of the 20th century. Growth and redevelopment have also resulted in many of Santa Clara's historic places falling prey to the bulldozer.

The late 1960s saw one of the City's more controversial decisions, to demolish its original downtown in hopes of creating a new economic center. Using Federal Urban Renewal funds, eight blocks along Franklin Street were acquired and torn down. Several of the former downtown business owners who survived relocated to the new two-block Franklin Square and the six blocks were offered to new development. Not much happened and it took until 1987 to develop the last parcel.

There are few persons today that don't believe that the old downtown could have been restored to a charming commercial center.but there is a new heightened awareness of the importance of preserving historic buildings. In 1976, a city-wide historic resources survey was completed by staff and volunteers. In 1985, the Historical and Landmarks Commission was appointed to act in an advisory capacity to City Council in all matters pertaining to historical landmarks, museums, community functions, special task groups, and to advise local residents and businesses on preservation related matters. The Commission is also responsible for the marking and preservation of historical landmarks/places and other functions as may be required.

The draft Historic Conservation District Ordinance, currently under review, is Santa Clara's most recent preservation initiative. In enacting this Article, the City recognizes the substantial aesthetic, environmental and economic importance of its historic and cultural resources. The purpose of this Article is to establish policies, regulations and standards to protect historic and cultural resources and to ensure that development in the Historic Conservation District is compatible and enhances the quality and character of Santa Clara. With the conscious efforts of the City Council, Historical and Landmarks Commission, and the many other groups and individuals, Santa Clara hopes to save its visible reminders of our past for future generations.

List of Sites

Hanna-Honeycomb House

A National Historic Landmark, the Hanna-Honeycomb House was Frank Lloyd Wright's (1867-1959) first work in the San Francisco region. Begun in 1937 and expanded over 25 years, this is the first and best example of Wright's innovative hexagonal design. Patterned after the honeycomb of a bee, the house incorporates six-sided figures with 120-degree angles in its plan, in its numerous tiled terraces, and even in built-in furnishings. Wright, born in Richland Center, Wisconsin, was an internationally known architect who combined the reformist ideals of 19th-century America with aspects of modernism. Wright created an organic architecture, and became arguably the best-known architect of the United States. In American National Bibliography Frederick Ivor-Campbell wrote "(the) Honeycomb House showed how Wright's system of Polygonal modules could provide the openness that he associated with freedom of movement while gracefully integrating the house with its sloping topography. The hexagonal modules of the floor plan gave the appearance of a honeycomb; hence the name of the house."

The Hanna-Honeycomb house was designed for Paul R. Hanna and his wife Jean, both well-known educators and for many years associated with Stanford University and the Hoover Institute. The project was begun while they were a young married couple and the house was expanded and adapted over time, with Wright's assistance, as their professional and personal needs changed. The house is one-story high with a central clerestory (an outside wall of a room or building that rises above an adjoining roof and contains windows) and is constructed of native redwood board and batten, San Jose brick, cement and plate glass. The house clings to and completes the hillside on which it was built as the floor and courtyard levels conform to the slope of this one and one-half acre site. The entire site includes the main house, a guesthouse, hobby shop, storage building, double garage, carport, breezeway, and garden house with pools and water cascade. After living in the house for 38 years, the Hannas gave the property to Stanford University in 1974. It was severely damaged by the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, and a major 10-year restoration was recently completed.

The Hanna-Honeycomb House is located at 737 Frenchman's Road, in Palo Alto. It is now owned by Stanford University, and is used for university functions such as seminars and receptions. Guided tours are offered by appointment only on the 1st Sunday and the 2nd and 4th Thursdays of each month--there is a fee for admission. Call 650-725-8352 or visit Stanford's website for further information.

Lou Henry and Herbert Hoover House

The Lou Henry and Herbert Hoover House, a National Historic Landmark, is a large, rambling International style house, resembling "blocks piled up." It was designed by Lou Henry Hoover, wife of Herbert Hoover, 31st President of the United States. Herbert Hoover's contribution was to order that the home be fireproof, and the walls were constructed of hollow tiles. Built from 1919 to 1920, the house was the couple's first and only permanent residence, and it was here that Hoover awaited the Presidential election returns in 1928, when he won against Alfred E. Smith, and 1932, when he lost the election to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. After Lou's death in 1944, her husband deeded the house to Stanford University to serve as a home for university professors.

Herbert Hoover, born in West Branch, Iowa in 1874, was a member of the first class of Leland Stanford, Jr. University. Opened in 1891 by former California Governor Leland Stanford and his wife in memory of their son, the University was located in Palo Alto, California, 30 miles south of San Francisco. Studying geology, Hoover met fellow student Lou Henry in a geology lab. Lou Henry, also born in Iowa in 1874, had moved to Monterey, California, with her family in 1884. She entered Stanford University in 1894. After graduation, Herbert Hoover worked for a while in the California gold mines and then in Western Australia, returning in 1899 to marry the recently graduated Lou Henry. For the rest of their lives the Hoovers would retain a strong affinity for their alma mater, maintaining residences on the campus despite travels and residences abroad in China, Ceylon, Burma, Siberia, Australia, Egypt, Japan, England, most of Europe, and finally Washington, D.C. Hoover played a highly publicized and praised role in relief efforts for some 33 million displaced and starving civilian victims of the First World War in Europe and was appointed Director General of Post War Relief and Rehabilitation in 1919 by President Woodrow Wilson.

Prior to the end of World War I the Hoovers had commissioned architect Louis Mulgardt to design their Stanford Home; however Mulgardt publicized his appointment prior to the end of the war. Angering the Hoovers, who felt that it was an inopportune time in the waning months of a terrible conflict to announce the construction of a large home, Mulgardt was dismissed. After several consultations the Hoovers convinced Arthur B. Clark, a Stanford art professor who practiced freelance architecture during the summer, to be their architect. Clark agreed on the condition that Mrs. Hoover design the house and that Clark, aided by architectural draftsman Charles Davus and Clark's architect son, Birge, would serve in an advisory capacity. Mrs. Hoover sketched ideas, watching construction, but when anyone told her that any of her architectural ideas weren't done, she responded, "Well, it's time someone did." The problem of size (Mrs. Hoover not wanting the house to appear too large or ostentatious) was solved by the hillside site with the house disappearing into the slope of San Juan Hill and hence appearing much smaller. The irregularly shaped house was built on a reinforced concrete slab foundation and rises two stories in the front and three stories in the rear. Resembling early International style homes, it was the opinion of the architects that Mrs. Hoover's designs were modeled after North African Algerian homes she had seen.

Completed in June 1920, the Hoovers lived there only a short time before Herbert was appointed Secretary of Commerce by President Warren G. Harding in 1921, a role he continued under President Calvin Coolidge. During Hoover's presidency (1929-32), the Hoover family only made brief visits to their Stanford home. They returned to this house after 1932, while maintaining a New York apartment as a second residence.

The Lou Henry and Herbert Hoover House is located at 623 Muranda Road, Stanford University, Palo Alto. It now serves as a residence for Stanford University professors, and is not open to the public.

Palo Alto Southern Pacific Railroad Depot

The Southern Pacific Depot on Cahill Street in San Jose is a multilevel combination passenger and freight railroad depot constructed in the Italian Renaissance Revival style. Built in 1935, it consists of a three-story central section flanked by two-story wings. The building, a compilation of rectangular sections, is 390 feet long and varies in width from 40 feet to 78 feet. The central section, which contains the passenger waiting room, measures 40 by 80 feet and is 33 feet in height. The high center pavilion housing the waiting room is constructed of steel columns and trusses. The side wings are framed with wood. The exterior walls are clad with tapestry brick or varied colors and arranged in an English bond pattern. The depot is located in an industrial area dominated by warehouses and related commercial businesses. Several vernacular sheds, a water tower, butterfly passenger sheds and the nearby Alameda underpass are all contributing buildings and structures within the railroad station.

The construction of this Southern Pacific Depot in 1935 was the culmination of a 30-year effort to relocate 4.5 miles of the South Pacific Coast line of the Southern Pacific Railroad away from the heavy traffic of the downtown area around the Market Street Depot to the west side of the city, an industrial neighborhood area in the 19th century and the former location of rail facilities belonging to other railroads. The Southern Pacific depot on Cahill Street was designed by Southern Pacific architect, John H. Christie, who had worked on the Southern Pacific remodeling of the Fresno, California, depot in 1915 and later, in 1939, worked on the Los Angeles Union Passenger Station. This depot is one of only four Italian Renaissance Revival style depots in California, and the largest surviving depot of the San Francisco-San Jose line. The only other large depot built in California during the 1930s was the Los Angeles Union Passenger Terminal. The Southern Pacific Depot in San Jose retains a high level of integrity.

The Southern Pacific Depot is located at 65 Cahill St., San Jose, and is open during normal business hours.

Ramona Street Architectural District

Ramona Street between University Avenue and Hamilton Avenue is a highly distinctive business block in downtown Palo Alto. It showcases the Spanish and Early California styles with gentle archways, wrought iron work, tile roofs of varying heights and courtyards. The development of Ramona Street was an early successful attempt to expand laterally the central commercial district. Pedro de Lemos, a craftsman, graphic artist and curator of the Stanford Museum had been concerned with the larger scale and somewhat linear development along University Avenue. He believed that an informal architecture full of whimsy and integrated with nature was indeed compatible with commercial businesses. The first to go up, in 1925, was the Gotham Shop at 520 Ramona, built by Pedro de Lemos. De Lemos had bought the property to preserve a very old oak tree (finally removed in the 1980s). He designed the building around the venerable oak and created shops with rustic benches, ceramic tiles and stucco walls. In 1938, de Lemos built another Spanish Colonial Revival commercial office building across the street at 533 - 539 Ramona, with a recessed arched entrance, an interior patio, wrought iron and more tiles.

Noted local architects Birge Clark, William Weeks and others added to the Spanish flavor of what de Lemos started. In 1928, Clark designed the multistory Medico-Dental Building at Hamilton and Ramona, which now houses the University Art Center on the ground floor. Across Ramona, Weeks designed the Cardinal Hotel, Palo Alto's first non-frame hotel. Excitement attended the Cardinal's debut, for it became the scene of tea dances and balls. The hotel had another purpose; it was intended to help make Hamilton a commercial street. The unified aspect of the 500 Ramona Street block was recognized by its designation in 1985 as a Historic District in the National Register of Historic Places. Since then, Plaza Ramona and other remodelings at the University Avenue end of the block have enhanced the theme.

Ramona Street is located in downtown Palo Alto, between University and Hamilton aves. The Ramona Street Architectural District includes 518 to 581 Ramona St. and 247, 255-267 Hamilton Ave.

Professorville Historic District

In 1889 land was subdivided to provide home sites for the professors who preferred to own rather than lease university land at Stanford University. The area, which came to be known as Professorville, is bounded by Kingsley, Lincoln, and Addison avenues and the cross streets of Ramona, Bryant, and Waverly. The city of Palo Alto was created subsequent to the founding of Stanford University, essentially to serve as a university town. Construction of the University began on May 14, 1887, on land that had been the Leland Stanford farm. Early founders desired the presence of a town near the University but the two existing nearby towns of Mayfield and Menlo Park did not seem suitable to them, as the founders wanted the new university town to prohibit the sale of alcoholic beverages. Since the two existing towns did not meet this requirement or seem willing to give up their saloon businesses, Leland Stanford, in 1887, acquired 740 acres to create a new townsite. The area's eclectic architecture is known for its brown shingles with gambrel roofs. Classic examples are Professor Angell's home at 1005 Bryant and Bernard Maybeck designed "Sunbonnet House" at 1061 Bryant. Professor A. B. Clark designed the stately 433 Melville house for Professor Charles Gilbert, one of Stanford's first teachers and a leading citizen of Palo Alto.

Stately Dutch Colonials dominate three blocks of Kingsley Avenue. At 450 Kingsley Avenue is the former home of one of Stanford University's pioneer professors, Ferando Sanford, who headed the physics department. The architect, Frank McMurray of Chicago, was a former student of Professor Sanford. He designed the three-story, 14-room frame house with a variety of features fashionable at the time--a Queen Anne corner tower, a Palladian window in front and an unusual archway reaching out past the second story. The comfortable, columned front porch reaches across the front to the west side of the house, where a doorway, once the carriage entrance, has been covered over. The buildings, which give the Professorville area its strongest image, are the brown-shingled houses whose stylistic allegiances range from the Colonial Revival to the Craftsman. The Professorville Historic District reflects the area's origins and its early years to the founding of both Stanford University and Palo Alto itself.

The Professorville Historic District is bounded by Kingsley, Lincoln, and Addison aves. and the cross streets Ramona, Bryant, and Waverly, in Palo Alto.

US Naval Air Station Sunnyvale, California, Historic District (Moffett Field)

Admiral William A. Moffett is credited with the creation of the two Naval Air Stations commissioned in the early 1930s to port the two U.S. Naval Airships (dirigibles). One of those stations, the Naval Air Station Sunnyvale, California, was the Pacific coast location selected, with help from northern Californian politicians and the leadership of the Chambers of Commerce from Mountain View to San Jose. The site of the US Naval Air Station Sunnyvale, California, Historic District, consists of a large number of buildings that were constructed from the 1930s on. By far the most famous and visible sites are Hangars #1, #2, and #3, which dwarf the surrounding buildings, standing as testament to the engineering skills of their builders. Towering majestically in the northeast corner of Santa Clara Valley is Hangar #1. Named as a Naval Historical Monument in the early 1950s, the hangar is constructed on an amazing network of steel girders sheathed with galvanized steel. It rests firmly upon a reinforced pad anchored to concrete pilings. The floor covers eight acres and can accommodate 10 football fields. "Number One," as it is popularly referred to, is 1,133 feet long and 308 feet wide. Its walls curve upward and inward, to form an elongated dome 198 feet high. Unique and spectacular are the "orange peel" doors, weighing 500 tons each. The doors are operated by an electrical control panel. Each door is powered by a 150 horsepower motor. One of the most recognizable landmarks in the San Francisco Bay Area, Hangar #1 and the original base are significant in the history of Naval Aviation, defense and in the development of the Santa Clara Valley. Making use of the facility location and landing field, NASA Ames Research Center is located to the north adjacent to the original plaza boundary and at the north boundary of the historic district. It was here that some of the original moon rocks taken from the Apollo lunar landings were studied by NASA geologists.

The hangar's interior is so large that fog sometimes forms near the ceiling. A person unaccustomed to its vastness is susceptible to optical disorientation. Looking across its deck, planes and tractors look like toys. Along its length maintenance shops, inspection laboratories and offices help keep the hangar busy. Looking up, you can see a network of catwalks for access to all parts of the structure. Two elevators meet near the top, allowing maintenance personnel to get to the top quickly and easily. Narrow gauge tracks run through the length of the hangar. During the lighter-than-air period of dirigibles and non-rigid aircraft, the rails extended across the apron and into the fields at each end of the hangar. This tramway facilitated the transportation of an airship on the mooring mast to the hangar interior or to the flight position. During the brief period that the U.S.S. Macon was based at Moffett from October 1933 until it was lost at sea in February 1935, Number One not only accommodated the giant airship but several smaller non-rigid LTA craft simultaneously. Hangar One is truly one of the most unique hangars in the world. Hangars #2 and #3 are significant more for their size than their unique styling or design. Along with Hangar #1, these two buildings help define the South San Francisco Bay Area from all distant directions. The style of the other buildings on the base is largely Spanish Colonial Revival, mostly built in the 1930s, with some International style buildings constructed in the 1940s and beyond. The Moffett Field Historical Society was founded in May of 1993. Until recently, their museum was located in historic "Hangar One."

Naval Air Station Sunnyvale is located near Mountain View and Sunnyvale, California, 35 miles south of San Francisco. From Highway 101 use the Moffett Field exit. The Moffett Museum has been located in Hangar One for several years, but relocated to an adjacent building after the hangar was closed due to potential toxic chemicals. If you plan to visit, inform the guard at the main gate that you are going to the museum and follow his instructions. Call 650-603-9827 or visit the Moffett Field Museum's website for further information.

Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel

Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel, a National Historic Landmark, was a research facility used extensively to design and test new generations of aircraft, both commercial and military, as well as National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) space vehicles, including the space shuttle. The Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel was created by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), parent agency of NASA. Constructed between 1950 and 1955, this complex actually contains three wind tunnels. It represents the continual development of superior aeronautical research facilities after the end of the Second World War. These research facilities formed the foundation from which NASA would launch the American effort to land a man on the moon.

After the construction of the Variable Density Wind Tunnel at Langley in 1921, NACA built an impressive variety of technical research facilities upon which the American aircraft industry was based. These facilities enabled the American aircraft industry to dominate the skies in both commercial and military aviation. By 1945, America's lead in the field of aviation seemed to be evaporating. The technological achievements of the German missiles and jet aircraft indicated a lag in American aeronautical research. In 1949, Congress passed the Unitary Plan Act, under which the Federal government coordinated a national plan of facility construction encompassing NACA, as well as the Air Force, private industry, and universities. The Unitary Plan resulted in the construction of a new series of wind tunnel complexes to support the American aircraft industry, including the Ames Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel Complex.

Construction of this facility began in 1950-1951 and continued until 1955. Because no one wind tunnel could meet all the demands for additional research facilities simulating the entire range of aircraft and missile flight, NACA chose to build the Ames tunnel with three separate test sections drawing power from a common centralized power plant. The transonic test section spanned 11 by 11 feet, while the two supersonic sections were smaller: nine by seven feet and eight by seven feet. Giant valves 20 feet in diameter supplied air from one supersonic leg to another. The American West Coast aircraft industry quickly capitalized on the Ames Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel Complex. The famed Boeing fleet of commercial transports and the Douglas DC-8, DC-9, and DC-10 were all tested here; as well as military aircraft such as the F-111 fighter, the C-5A transport and the B-1 bomber. In addition to aircraft, in the 1960s and 1970s almost all NASA manned space vehicles including the Space Shuttle were tested in the Ames Unitary Plan Wind tunnel complex.

The major element of the tunnel complex is its drive system, consisting of four intercoupled electric motors. The transonic wind tunnel is a closed-return, variable density tunnel with a fixed geometry, ventilated throat, and a single-jack flexible nozzle. Airflow is produced by a three-stage, axial-flow compressor powered by four-wound-rotor, variable-speed induction motors. For conventional steady-state tests, models are generally supported on a string. A schlieran system, one that allows regions of varying refraction in a transparent medium caused by pressure or temperature differences and detectable by photographing the passage of a beam of light, is available for studying flow patterns, either by direct viewing or by photographs. The details of the larger supersonic tunnel are much the same, except that it is equipped with an asymmetric, sliding-block nozzle and the airflow is produced by an 11-stage, axial-flow compressor powered by four variable-speed, wound-rotor, induction motors. The smaller supersonic tunnel is a closed-return, variable-density tunnel equipped with a symmetrical, flexible-wall throat and the sidewalls are positioned by a series of jacks operated by hydraulic motors.

The Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel, a National Historic Landmark, is also featured in the Aviation History Travel Itinerary. It is located at the Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Sunnyvale, California. Moffett Field is 35 miles south of San Francisco. From Highway 101 use the Moffett Field exit. The Ames Research Visitor Center is open 8:00am to 4:30pm Monday - Friday, you can reach them at 650-604-5000. Admission is free. There are no tours of the wind tunnels.

James Lick Mill

The James Lick Mill a complex of buildings reflecting the varied uses of the property over its history. The major historical constructions are a brick granary and millpond from the original mill built by James Lick around 1855, the large house built by Lick around 1858 and a late Victorian-era office building. James Lick was born in Pennsylvania in 1796. He came to San Francisco in 1848 after a successful career as a piano builder in South America. From San Francisco Lick went to Santa Clara County. Lick built this Italianate mansion between 1858 and 1860 next to his flour mill. The mansion is constructed of native redwood featuring marvelous woodwork and imported marble fireplaces in each of its 24 rooms. This property was once part of the RanchoUlistac grant, a square league reaching from the Alviso shoreline southward and encompassing all the land between the Guadalupe and Saratoga Creeks. His farm background helped him realize the potential of the site for agricultural production. Around the mansion and mill, Lick developed a highly successful orchard operation and pioneered the introduction of new fruits and horticultural techniques. Imported specimens include the impressive cork oaks on the property planted by Lick himself.

Shrewd real estate investments at the time of the gold rush made Lick the richest man in California by 1873. When he died in 1876, James Lick left an estate of over three million dollars for various public projects, a major part of which went to establish Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton where he is buried. Lick generously gave his estate to benefit charitable and scientific organizations. The Home of Benevolence, San Jose's orphanage for many years, was founded through one of Lick's grants and was later known as Eastfield Children's Home. It is now part of EMQ Children and Family Services. An 1882 fire destroyed the mill and in 1902 the Lick Mill complex was converted to the manufacture of alcohol. A series of owners, including Union Distilling, Western Grain and Sugar Products, Western Carbonic Gas, American Salt and Chemical, and Commercial Solvents and Chemical, manufactured a wide variety of products at this location. In the 1970s, the site was sold to a developer. The Lick Mansion and grounds were preserved and today the public can visit

The Lick Mansion and grounds are located at 4101 Lick Mill Blvd., Santa Clara, on the grounds of the Mansion Grove Apartment complex. The public can visit by going to the Mansion Grove Apartment complex office, which is open between 9:00am and 6:00pm, to gain access. For more information contact Mansion Grove Apt. at 408-980-0502.

Agnews Insane Asylum

Today known as the world famous Sun Microsystems/Agnews Developmental Center, the campus-like setting of the former Agnews Insane Asylum consists of a grouping of numerous reinforced concrete, brick, stucco and tile buildings. They are constructed in large rectangular-shaped plans and designed in a Mediterranean Revival style. The buildings are formally placed within a landscaped garden of palms, pepper trees and vast lawns. The treatment of the insane in California dates from the earliest days of the Gold Rush. The first provisions for the insane were to lock them up with criminals in the ship Ephemia, purchased in 1849 by the City of San Francisco, and later to house them at the San Francisco marine hospital in 1850, used primarily for ailing seamen. In 1885 the Agnews Residential Facility was established by the California State Legislature as a neuropsychiatric institution for the care and treatment of the mentally ill. Agnews, opened in 1889, was the third institution in the state established for the mentally ill. Twenty-one years later, the greatest tragedy of the 1906 earthquake in Santa Clara County took place at the old Agnews State Hospital. The multistoried, unreinforced masonry building crumbled, killing over 100 patients.

The Institution was then redesigned in, what was then, a revolutionary cottage plan spreading the low-rise buildings along tree-lined streets in a manner that resembled a college campus. The Mediterranean Revival style buildings were constructed of concrete with tile roofs, decorative tile patterns, rustic wooden balconies, porch columns and bannisters. Bands of decorative tile patterns reflect the Hispanic influence on the buildings. Now at the center of the Sun Microsystems/Agnews complex is the Clock Tower Building (formerly the Treatment Building) with its massive symmetrical clock tower. The auditorium is an outstanding building, which seems as beautiful today as it was in 1913. Agnews State Hospital was significant as the first modern mental hospital in California, and subsequently other State facilities, followed the example of Agnews. It embodied the distinctive characteristics of a progressive mental hospital in the early 20th century as it was intended to be a "cheerful" place with its decentralized specialized buildings for different treatment purposes and different types of patients. Its small, low-scale buildings were designed to bring light and air to patients.

After World War II, new approaches to treatment had an effect on hospital operations and facilities. Among the most important new approaches were the establishment of community clinics, treatment outside of hospitals, and treatment of the developmentally disabled at State Hospitals formerly intended for the mentally ill. A watershed event was the passage of the 1971 Laterman Act, which resulted in closing of several State hospitals and restructuring of the State system. Since that time there has been an increasing move toward closing hospitals and reliance on community treatment programs.

In 1996, the State of California put up for sale 90 acres of the surplus State land (the former site of Agnews Developmental Center). Intense community interest in the future of the site made decisions about the development of the land a challenge. To foster the site's preservation, Agnews Hospital was listed in the National Register of Historic Places for its historic and architectural significance. Sun Microsystems invested $10 million in the restoration of key historic buildings on the property where it built its corporate headquarters, office/research and development space for more than 3,000 employees. This project was a first of its kind; in which a city, community and corporation share, in an interactive way, a work environment and a public environment. Two of the restored historic buildings, the auditorium and the mansion, are available for cultural and social events by community groups on evenings and weekends. Most of the major stands of heritage trees around the historic buildings were preserved and the park-like grounds beautified and maintained for the use of local residents. Local historical groups worked with Sun to refurbish a small local history museum inside the auditorium, the historic Agnews cemetery and a monument to victims of the 1906 earthquake. Smaller residential buildings from the original Agnews Hospital complex are being relocated and will become part of an affordable housing project on another portion of the State surplus land. The site also includes 100+ year-old trees, historically a habitat for the protected species of burrowing owls. Worries about this owl population were overcome when the State agreed to purchase a suitable habitat for the owls and deed it to the California Deparment of Fish and Game for perpetual management. Both Sun and the City helped to finance the acquisition of this new home for burrowing owls. The auditorium and mansion have been used for many public events since their restoration was completed including performances by the community ballet, chorale, symphony and drum and bugle corps.

Located on Lafayette St. at Agnew Rd., Santa Clara. Park and grounds are open to the public. For rental of the auditorium and mansion, contact the City of Santa Clara's Parks and Recreation Department at 408-615-2261.

Charles Copeland Morse House

In 1892 Charles Copeland Morse, "The American Seed King" who co-founded the giant Ferry-Morse Seed Co., completed the house of his dreams. Born in Thomaston, Maine, in 1842 Charles came to California originally in 1859, lured by the search for gold. After mining for a couple of years, he found his way to Santa Clara in 1862. Santa Clara was then a small town with an agricultural setting. Mr. Moore engaged in several occupations, among them that of a house painter. Charles Copeland Morse married Maria Josephine Victoria Langford in 1868. In 1877, he and a Methodist minister pooled their money to buy a seed-growing enterprise, which became the Ferry-Morse Seed Co. This company eventually led the world in flower and vegetable seed productions. In addition to being active in his business, he was one of the founders of the Bank of Santa Clara and the Advent Christian Church of Santa Clara. Charles and Maria had five children who grew up in the mansion that a local newspaper dubbed "the house that seed built."

This house is a classic Queen Anne Victorian. Rising three stories over a raised basement, the twin gables, witches' hat turret, decorative shingles, trims and stained glass windows all contribute to the grand effect. The entry is distinguished by an ornate front porch. Inside the mansion are rich wood molding, stained glass windows and chandeliers. A unique chandelier is found in the old dining room. This brass fixture came from the family of the founder of the Bank of America, A. P. Giannini. About 1975, Caroline and Vaughn Nixon bought the house and restored the ornate mansion to its original grandeur. The Morse Mansion presently hosts law offices but the interior retains an air of elegance.

The Morse Mansion has been used as a law office for the last 20 years and is not open to the public. The house is located at 981 Fremont St., Santa Clara, on the corner of Fremont and Washington sts.

Andrew J. Landrum House

The Andrew J. Landrum House is one of the perfect period pieces which give the Old Quad area of Santa Clara its architectural quality. Andrew Landrum, a noted Santa Clara carpenter, designed his new home in 1875. He combined the then popular Italianate and Gothic Revival styles he found in pattern books, as seen in the corner quoins, the Italianate porch with scroll brackets, gables with cross-bracing and the cruciform interior plan. The two-story wooden residence was built on a "T" shaped plan which exhibits crossed, steeply gabled rooflines which are punctuated by a brick chimney and sheathed in wooden shingles. Largely unaltered, the house is an excellent example of eclecticism.

The Andrew Landrum House is significant not only because of its distinctive architecture, but also due to the historical associations with Andrew Landrum, the builder, who was an early pioneer in Santa Clara. Mr. Landrum was advertised in the Santa Clara County Directory as a "carpenter." Little can be ascertained about the Landrum family. However, the Landrums must have been quite prominent as "Landrum, Miss M. 1217 Santa Clara Avenue" is listed in the Social Directory of 1903, as compiled by March Bowden Carroll. Miss Landrum was one of the 29 ladies listed under the Santa Clara Section of the San Jose Social Directory. Most of the ladies stipulated certain days and hours when they would be at home for callers, but Miss Landrum did not do so. It is also said locally that the Landrum House was one of the few buildings in Santa Clara whose chimney did not crumble in the earthquake of 1906. No major alterations have changed the building over the last 125 years and it remains one of Santa Clara's oldest and best preserved houses.

The Landrum house is located at 1217 Santa Clara St., at the north west corner of Santa Clara and Jackson Sts. This is a private residence and is not open to the public.

Santa Clara Depot

The Santa Clara passenger depot, the oldest operating railroad depot in California, was constructed by the San Francisco & San Jose Railroad Company in 1863. The 24'x50' board and batten depot was one of the two "way stations" built between San Francisco and San Jose. Plans for a railroad linking San Francisco and San Jose began as early as 1851. Though this scheme ultimately failed, the incorporation of the San Francisco and San Jose Railroad in 1859 met with success. Most of the financing for the project came from county government in San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, with the University of Santa Clara and local industry also playing a significant role in both stock acquisition and choice of placement of the depot in Santa Clara. The first passenger service to San Francisco started in January 1864. The Southern Pacific Railroad acquired the San Francisco & San Jose Railroad in 1868. The depot, originally erected on the east side of the railroad tracks, was moved to its present location in 1877 and attached to the existing 32'x50' freight house constructed several years earlier. Also, because of the large volume of agricultural freight shipped from the depot, the freight house was increased in size at that time to its present dimensions of 32'x160'.

On November 1, 1877, the San Jose Mercury reported the facility nearing completion. Following construction of the railroad, farming and fruit-related industries developed in the Santa Clara area, with the depot serving as a focal point for shipping. Rail service provided the fast, direct link to San Francisco and, in the later 1870s, to Southern California. Typical of these efforts were those of James A. Dawson, who pioneered the area's fruit-canning industry in 1871. By the turn of the century, the Pratt-Low Preserving Company, the largest fruit packing plant in central California, was located just south of the depot. Caltrans acquired the depot from Southern Pacific in 1980. In cooperation with California Department of Transportation, the South Bay Historical Railroad Society, a nonprofit group founded in 1985, began renovation work in 1986 on the depot, by then badly in need of repair. A group of dedicated volunteers spent over 25,000 hours hauling away debris, replacing support timbers, siding, exterior decking and interior flooring, scraping peeling paint, painting and many other repairs. With the major renovation now complete, this 139-year-old building hosts a railroad library and museum while still serving its original function as a passenger depot.

The museum is located in the restored Depot where model railroads are on display and school groups are offered courses which emphasize the influence of the railroad on California's history. Museum hours are Tuesday from 6:00 - 9:00pm and Saturdays from 10:00am. - 4:00pm. The Santa Clara Railroad Depot is located at 1005 Railroad Ave. in Santa Clara. Entrance is free.

Southern Pacific Depot

The Southern Pacific Depot on Cahill Street in San Jose is a multilevel combination passenger and freight railroad depot constructed in the Italian Renaissance Revival style. Built in 1935, it consists of a three-story central section flanked by two-story wings. The building, a compilation of rectangular sections, is 390 feet long and varies in width from 40 feet to 78 feet. The central section, which contains the passenger waiting room, measures 40 by 80 feet and is 33 feet in height. The high center pavilion housing the waiting room is constructed of steel columns and trusses. The side wings are framed with wood. The exterior walls are clad with tapestry brick or varied colors and arranged in an English bond pattern. The depot is located in an industrial area dominated by warehouses and related commercial businesses. Several vernacular sheds, a water tower, butterfly passenger sheds and the nearby Alameda underpass are all contributing buildings and structures within the railroad station.

The construction of this Southern Pacific Depot in 1935 was the culmination of a 30-year effort to relocate 4.5 miles of the South Pacific Coast line of the Southern Pacific Railroad away from the heavy traffic of the downtown area around the Market Street Depot to the west side of the city, an industrial neighborhood area in the 19th century and the former location of rail facilities belonging to other railroads. The Southern Pacific depot on Cahill Street was designed by Southern Pacific architect, John H. Christie, who had worked on the Southern Pacific remodeling of the Fresno, California, depot in 1915 and later, in 1939, worked on the Los Angeles Union Passenger Station. This depot is one of only four Italian Renaissance Revival style depots in California, and the largest surviving depot of the San Francisco-San Jose line. The only other large depot built in California during the 1930s was the Los Angeles Union Passenger Terminal. The Southern Pacific Depot in San Jose retains a high level of integrity.

The Southern Pacific Depot is located at 65 Cahill St., San Jose, and is open during normal business hours.

De Anza Hotel

The historic De Anza Hotel, the tallest hotel in the San Jose central business district, is a 10-story concrete and steel reinforced high-rise building with a 4-story rear section. Significant for its architectural style, the De Anza Hotel is one of San Jose's few Zig Zag Moderne (Art Deco) buildings. This architectural significance extends into the elaborate Spanish Colonial Revival interior design motifs. The De Anza Hotel was funded by the local business community, united in an organization called the San Jose Community Hotel Corporation. The hotel took three years of planning by this group and stock subscriptions were obtained from more than 200 local citizens. Noted architect William Weeks was the building's designer and Carl Swenson was the contractor. Local business leaders emphasized that the hotel would benefit San Jose and that the modern accommodations would help attract conventions to the area. Ground breaking occurred on February 27, 1930, and was presided over by the corporation president, Alexander Hart, and many of San Jose's most prominent citizens and businessmen.

The facade features a 10-story central section flanked by a 9-story section on either side. These massings along with the building's zigzag parapet give it a stepped appearance. The first and second stories of the building house its lobby and mezzanine. Fenestration consists mostly of simple sash, double-hung windows except for the second level of the facade, which is highlighted by a band of 12 arched windows. The relief patterns include a string course separating the first and second levels, rosettes on the second level, and an elaborate art deco design through to the final two stories. Some Mayan influences can be seen in the design details of the stepped parapet. On the west elevation is painted "Hotel De Anza" with a diver used to indicate a swimming pool which is at the rear of the building within a small courtyard area. The interior of the De Anza is distinguished by a spectacular main lobby where Art Deco elements are skillfully integrated into a predominantly Spanish decorative scheme. The lobby reaches two stories in height and contains large wooden beams with stenciled colored floral patterns. Major factors of the interior design are the highly detailed wrought iron balconies, the huge wrought iron chandelier and double arch doorways. To one side is a fireplace with a huge canopy that reaches to the ceiling. Interior doors are all distinguished by their colored stenciled floral designs.

The De Anza Hotel is located along East Santa Clara, South First, Second and Third sts. and East San Fernando St., San Jose. Please call 408-286-1000 for further information, or look up the history of the hotel at www.hoteldeanza.com

Luis Maria Peralta Adobe

The Luis Maria Peralta Adobe was built before 1800, and remodeled in the mid 19th century. The original builder was probably Manuel Gonzalez, an Apache Indian. The adobe covers an area of 20 feet by 41 feet, and has two connecting rooms of approximately equal size. The walls are about two feet thick and made of adobe blocks that are 22" by 11" by 4." This building was built around the Market Plaza of early San Jose. At the time it was built, this adobe was not unique, but now it is the last vestige of the Pueblo de San Jose de Guadalupe.

Manuel Gonzalez, his wife and five children accompanied the Anza Party to California in 1776. He was one of the founders of the Pueblo de San Jose de Guadalupe, the first municipal government in California, established in 1777. This was the second house that Gonzalez chose to live in, the first site was untenable due to winter flooding. In 1804 Gonzalez died and the adobe went to Luis Maria Peralta. Peralta was a soldier and one of the owners of one of the largest ranchos in Mexican California. His father, Corporal Gabriel Peralta, brought his family with him during the Anza expedition (1775-76) and was one of the first 15 families living in San Jose listed in the pardon of 1778. When he reached the age of 21, Luis entered, as was traditional, into the military of the King of Spain. Wedding Maria Loreto Alviso in 1784, Luis afterwards transferred from the Monterey to the San Francisco Company serving with the Escolta (guards) at Mission Santa Clara, Mission San Jose and as corporeal of the guard at Mission Santa Cruz. Phyllis Filiberti Butler records, in her book, The Valley of Santa Clara, Historic Buildings, 1792-1920, that after an attack on the priest and majordomo of Mission San Jose in 1805, "he led the full garrison from the fort at San Francisco into the San Juaquim Valley in pursuit of the Indians." Surprising the Indians in their village, Peralta won a swift victory, which enhanced his reputation. Then a sergeant, he was honored by appointment as comisionado in charge of Pueblo San Jose in 1807, the highest military and civilian official. Don Luis Maria Peralta held this position until 1822, when the position ended with Mexico's independence from Spain.

The Peralta Adobe is located at 184 West Saint John St., San Jose and is run by History San José. It is open Saturday & Sunday, 12:00pm to 5:00pm for tours. There is a fee. Call 408-918-1040 for more information. History San Jose also operates the The Fallon House located on the northside of West Saint John St., and is the fully restored and lavishly furnished Italianate home of an early mayor of San Jose.

Hotel Sainte Claire (Larkspur)

Today a Larkspur Hotel, the Hotel Sainte Claire is a hexagonal six-story building, dominating a corner lot at a busy downtown San Jose intersection. The significance of the Sainte Claire Hotel is twofold. First, its history is an integral part of the history of San Jose and remains to this day among the city's most recognized architectural landmarks. Secondly, the Sainte Claire was designed by the prominent San Francisco architectural firm of Weeks and Day, which also designed several of the great hotels in San Francisco, including the Mark Hopkins and St. Francis. Weeks and Day were well noted for both their school and hotel designs in California. Interior similarities exist between San Jose's Sainte Claire and the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco. Especially notable are the coffered lobby ceilings designed by the firm for both buildings. The northwest corner is truncated and recessed forming the corner entrance which faces the intersection of South Market and San Carlos Streets. North and west elevations meet the truncated corner at a 120-degree angle, thus framing the entrance. Tawny brick sheathes the steel and concrete frame on floors two through six, and rusticated buff colored stone faces the ground level. The three part vertical composition includes the arcaded ground level, a shaft of four stories, and the six floors distinguished by paired windows set in arched frames. Denticular stringcourses separate the first and second floors, the third and fourth floors and the fifth and sixth floors. Detailing is basically derived from the Renaissance Revival tradition, though there are several references to French and Spanish architecture.

The hotel lobby remains the most intact interior space within the building. The Patio Room, once the hallmark of the hotel, has been covered over, modernized and combined with the Empire Room. Originally, the open patio room was framed by a Corinthian arcade. A small formal garden and fountain room, the Spartan Room on the second floor has also been modernized. Ceilings in the lobby, Spartan and Empire rooms were handpainted, but alterations over the years have obliterated the original work. Wood details in the guest rooms and the ornate hand-carved wood doors leading to the retail areas are intact. Many of the rooms have original bathroom fixtures. The hotel was financed by noted realtor and developer T. S. Montgomery, a prominent citizen of San Jose largely responsible for much of the commercial development in the downtown. In addition to financing such an ambitious project, Montgomery donated to the city a parcel of land across from the hotel for the new civic auditorium, which stands today. The Hotel Sainte Claire enjoyed the status of being the premiere grand hotel in the entire south peninsula region, and the reputation of having the most elegant accommodations between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Located at 302 South Market St., San Jose, the Hotel Sainte Claire, now a Larkspur Hotel, is an active business. There are pamphlets available for the public about the hotel's history. Call 408-295-2000 or visit www.thesainteclaire.com for further information.

The Sainte Claire is a Historic Hotels of America member, a program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

San Jose Downtown Historic District

As Santa Clara Valley's mercantile and financial center for the past 100 years, San Jose's downtown historic commercial district is significant both from a historic and an architectural perspective. The district includes buildings dating from the 1870s, reflecting the emergence of the American city; buildings from the 1890s, reflecting San Jose's boom years as an agricultural center; and buildings from the 1920s, showcasing the South Bay Area's first skyscraper. Thus, the district is unsurpassed in Santa Clara County in its broad representation of historic California commercial architecture. San Jose's history stretches back to the days of the Spanish colonial empire in North America. El Pueblo de San Jose de Guadalupe, chartered by the King of Spain, founded in 1777, was Alta California's first civil settlement. Following the Mexican-American War, San Jose was ceded with the territory of California to the United States. Immediately, the city was surveyed first by Thomas Campbell in 1847 and later by Chester Lyman, in 1848, following the standard grid street pattern utilizing traditional Spanish pathways. This street pattern has remained virtually unaltered to this day. The development of American commercial areas in San Jose extended into this newly surveyed area, just east of the Spanish Pueblo site of 1797 (relocated from the originial site after major flooding).

The best remaining example of downtown commercial architecture of the 1870s and 1880s within the district is the three-story Italianate Oddfellows Building at the corner of Santa Clara and Third streets (1883). Another building from this time period is located at 58 South First Street, today known as La Rosa Pharmacy. The building was built in 1870 and was known as the Pomeroy Building. Though the façade has been altered with the addition of stucco siding, an examination of the back of the building reveals the original brick construction. In the 1870s and mid-1880s, the heart of downtown commercial activity had moved northward along Market Street (immediately west of First Street and part of the Pueblo) to the Santa Clara Street intersection. However, by the latter part of the 1880s, Santa Clara and First streets became the new focus for downtown business activity. The early horse drawn railway systems reinforced the importance of this intersection with single and, later, double tracks located along both streets. During the 1890s, important commercial buildings were constructed down First Street reflecting the Romanesque Revival architecture of the East Coast. This streetscape represents a group of buildings designed by the finest local architects including Levi Goodrich and Jacob Lenzen, and built by the leading citizens of the time: James Phelan, F. Sourisseau, C. T. Ryland, Martin Murphy's descendants and the Auzerais family. Buildings such as the Knox-Goodrich Building at 34 South First Street, with its extreme rustication, reflect the qualities of the wealthy, orchard oriented, agricultural community of the turn-of-the-century. Other significant buildings include the Letitia Building (1890) and the Romanesque Revival Security Building (1892). The dominating building of the intersection is the Bank of America Building (1926), San Jose's first "skyscraper," built by H. A. Minton. The bank was featured in Architect and Engineering Record of California as one of the first earthquake-proof constructions in the area. The Bank of America has long been a "landmark" building, at 13 stories plus tower it locates the heart of downtown San Jose.

Following the great earthquake of 1906, Edwardian and Neo-Classical commercial buildings replaced the damaged Victorian and Romanesque businesses. Another significant building from this time period within the historic district is the Landmark Square built in 1907 at 87 South Second Street. This building and the streetscape of Santa Clara Boulevard between Third and Fourth streets represent excellent examples of the cleaner lines of the post-earthquake period design. The one building which defies the new 20th-century style of commercial architecture is the de Saisset property located at Santa Clara and South Second streets. This three-story Italianate building was built in 1900 and although representative of styles common for the previous two decades, was termed to be the "New Century Block." Mission Revival, California's first indigenous architecture, dominated smaller commercial architecture. Desimones Bike Shop (82 South Second Street) and the Jose Theater (64 South Second Street) perfectly reflect the design qualities of the city's new Hispanic influenced downtown architecture. Spanish Colonial Revival also provided California with a new historic architectural mode and the "El Paseo" shopping block on South First Street reflects the most popular commercial architecture of the 1920s in California.

During the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, modernization and further consolidation characterized the downtown core. The Moderne Drug Company at 50 Santa Clara Street reflects the "machine age" streamline design of the 1930s, as does the Moyer Music Store at South Second and San Fernando streets. New Growth patterns to the west and south of the center of the city changed the commercial desirability of the downtown core area of San Jose. New construction was virtually nonexistent until the government sponsored redevelopment programs of the 1960s began razing of the entire center city blocks for planned new development. The historic downtown commercial district retains the highest concentration of older buildings in the downtown, which reflects the best examples of architecture from almost every period in the growth of the "American City." There is currently a movement on the part of many property owners to rehabilitate and reuse their older buildings. Designation of this area as a National Register of Historic Places district has promoted and encouraged renewed pride.

The San Jose Downtown Commercial District is roughly bounded by S. First St. to the west, E. San Fernando St. to the south, S. Third St. to the west, and E. Santa Clara St. to the north, but also includes the south side of E. Santa Clara St. between Third and Fourth Sts. Visit www.sjdowntown.com to find information on upcoming events and attractions in the downtown area.

Winchester House

The Winchester House, or Winchester Mystery House as it is better known, is a 160-room Victorian Mansion built by Sarah L. Winchester, wife of rifle manufacturer William Wirt Winchester. Sarah and William were married on September 30, 1862, and had one child, Annie Pardee, who died about a month after birth in 1866. William Winchester died on March 7, 1881, after which Mrs. Winchester, upset at the deaths of her husband and daughter, reportedly consulted a spiritualist. This medium informed Mrs. Winchester that the victims killed by the Winchester rifles her family manufactured were seeking revenge by taking the lives of her family. The spiritualist also conveyed to Mrs. Winchester that the spirits had placed a curse on her, and that if she wished to live, she must appease them by moving out west and constantly, without ceasing, build a house for them night and day. It wasn't until Sarah Winchester died at the age of 85 in September 1922 that work on her bizarre, multi-gabled house finally stopped. The fantastic Eastlake shingle Queen Anne house was built at an estimated cost of five million dollars.

Construction began in 1884. The abundance of timber within close proximity to San Jose allowed Mrs. Winchester's imagination free reign to try out what was evidently her consuming interest in architectural innovation. This unique building includes many outstanding elements of Victorian architecture and fine craftsmanship. There are rooms with gold plated fixtures, exquisite doors and windows of stained Tiffany glass set in silver designs as well as practical household innovations years ahead of their time. The continual building and remodeling created a 160-room house covering an area of six acres. Shortly after Mrs. Winchester's death in 1922 the house was sold and then opened to the public as the Winchester Mystery House. The Gardens Tour also has many points of interest, including the Greenhouse, Tank House and Fruit Drying Shed.

The Winchester Mystery House is located at 525 South Winchester Blvd., San Jose. Tours are offered daily, for a fee. For information on seasonal operating hours, special tours and events call 408-247-2101 or visit www.winchestermysteryhouse.com

Le Petit Trianon

Built in 1892 for Charles A. Baldwin and his wife Ellen Hobart Baldwin, the mansion known as Le Petit Trianon was once the center of their successful wine-producing estate where the couple was known to entertain lavishly. Baldwin installed a massive stone winery; built underground cellars (today part of the De Anza College grounds) and planted vines from Bordeaux and other regions of France. Under the label Beaulieu, Baldwin's wines were sold in New York, London and Central America. The design for Le Petit Trianon was drawn from classical French architectural motifs popular in America at the end of the 19th century. It is also the only example of "V" rustic redwood construction remaining in the area. The name Le Petite Trianon stems from its similarities to the architecture of "Le Grand Trianon," built for Louis XIV of France. Similar detail to this French precedent can be seen in Le Petite Trianon's columns, pilasters, windows and wood shutters.

In 1909, the mansion was sold to Harriet Pullman Carolon, daughter of George Pullman, inventor of the Pullman sleeping car. Carolon also found the home a wonderful setting for elaborate social functions. In 1940, the house was sold to E. F. Euphrat, owner of the Pacific Can Company. Since 1965 the estate has been the site of De Anza College. Remnants of the garden remain; the winery is still there, as are the guest cottages. The lovely house has twice been moved, first to make room for the Flint Center (theater) and next yielding to a parking lot. A restoration of the mansion was completed in the 1980s, and the house now serves as the California History Center, dedicated to preserving and bringing to life the history of Santa Clara Valley, the bay region and California.

Le Petite Trianon is located within the De Anza College Campus at 1250 Stevens Creek Blvd., Cupertino, California. The California History Center is open from September through June, Monday-Thursday 8:30am to 12:00pm, and 1:00pm to 4:30pm, or Friday by appointment. For more information call 408-864-8712. A California Studies program is offered with changing exhibits, lectures, and special events which focus on Santa Clara Valley's past.

Picchetti Brothers Winery

The Picchetti Brothers Winery, also known as the Picchetti Ranch, contains a complex of seven buildings built between 1880 and 1920, which retain their original design details. The Picchetti bothers, Secondo and Vincenso, for whom the ranch was named, were among the first settlers on a ridge which they named "Monte Bello" or "beautiful mountain." They were among the earliest settlers to plant grapes on this ridge which was later to become one of Santa Clara's important vineyard areas. Vincenzo and Secundo Picchetti settled on Montebello ridge in 1877 and purchased an initial 160 acres for $1,500. The ranch went from the original 160 acres to 500 acres by 1904. Vincenzo Picchetti built the first house on the property about 1882, followed by a larger residence in 1886. Both homes, plus the stone winery, were in the Picchetti family until 1976. Instrumental in establishing the Montebello School in 1892, Vincenzo served on the first school board and supplied a room for a teacher at his ranch. Vineyards were the life blood of the town of Cupertino's early economy, although grape parasites destroyed many of the vines in the region in the 1890s. Cupertino remained largely rural until the suburban explosion of the 1960s.

Upon Vencenzo's death in 1904, sons Antone and John ran the winery and ranch. The front porch of the main house was once screened in and acted as an aviary. Later John had numerous aviaries built - one of those aviaries still stands in front of the homestead house. The setting remains intact as part of the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District. The Santa Clara County Historical Heritage Commission provided funding for the restoration of the winery building. Today the Picchetti ranch and winery on Montebello Road remain as evidence of a thriving viticulture industry in early Cupertino.

Located at 13100 Montebello Rd., south west of Cupertino, California, the Picchetti Winery operates under private lease in a cooperative relationship with the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District to help preserve the history of winemaking in the region. Winery is open to the public from 11:00am until 5:00pm daily. Call 408-741-1310 or visit www.picchetti.com for more information.

Paul Masson Mountain Winery

Today, thousands of music lovers gather for the Music in the Vineyards Concerts held at the Paul Masson Mountain Winery every summer high in the hills above Silicon Valley. The view is still as stunning as when Paul Masson, a Burgundian born in 1859, cleared the hilltop to plant his vineyards here in 1901. Masson came to California in 1878 where he met Charles Lefranc, one of a number of French immigrants who had expanded the viticulture introduced into the Santa Clara Valley by the Catholic mission fathers. While in California, Masson took a number of business courses at the College of the Pacific in San Jose, and in 1880 returned to France to work in the wine industry there. When the vine pest phylloxera depressed the Burgundian viticulture, Masson returned to California where he went to work for Lefranc. In 1887 Lefranc died, and Masson married his daughter Louise. After their honeymoon in France, Masson returned to California to take over management of the Lefranc properties, then owned by Lefranc's two sisters and his son Henry. After a short-lived partnership with Henry LeFranc, Masson bought out Henry's share in the Almaden Vineyard. In 1892 Masson's first champagne was introduced at Almaden, and he eventually became know as the "Champagne King of California."

Masson later centered his champagne production here in Saratoga while other wines were developed at the Almaden operation. In 1905, on a knoll above the winery, Masson built his house, dubbed "The Chateau," where he developed a reputation as an unrivaled host. Louise Masson was a prohibitionist and did not attend the lavish dinner parties held at The Chateau. Masson was able to weather the strains Prohibition placed on the wine industry by selling grapes to the wholesale market and by receiving a special dispensation to sell medicinal champagnes. The sandstone winery was rebuilt after the 1906 earthquake, making use of sandstone blocks from the Saratoga Wine Company's building on Big Basin Way, also destroyed in the great quake. At this same time the ancient entrance portal was added to the structure, reputed to be medieval and imported from Spain for use in St. Patrick's Church in San Jose. Wine making ceased in 1952, and the concert series began in 1958. Today, new owners interested in the wine making tradition are planning to plant vineyards once again.

The Paul Masson Mountain Winery is located at 14831 Pierce Rd, in Saratoga. Call 408-741-2822 or visit www.mountainwinery.com for further information. Events are held at the winery, such as concert series, special events, weddings, etc.

Villa Montalvo

Villa Montalvo, a magnificent Mediterranean mansion with surrounding gardens, is one of the last great estates gracing the Santa Clara countryside. It stands as an appropriate memorial to James Duval Phelan, for many years considered "the foremost citizen of California." Son of an ambitious Irish immigrant who came to San Francisco during the gold rush and made a fortune, James Duval Phelan become mayor of San Francisco and a United States Senator. Phelan encouraged the building of the Hetch Hetchy water system for San Francisco, and is considered to be one of the fathers of the establishment of San Francisco's Civic Center. He donated the first monument of Father Junípero Serra in San Francisco. In addition, the Shakespeare bust in Golden Gate Park was contributed by Phelan, and he also donated one million dollars to the Red Cross for disaster relief following the 1906 earthquake. The Phelen Building in San Francisco was the first business to be erected after the earthquake; in part to demonstrate Phelan's faith in the rebuilding of San Francisco.

In 1911, James Phelan purchased 160 acres in the Saratoga foothills and embarked upon his Villa Montalvo project. Construction began on the mansion in 1912, with William Curlett chosen as supervising architect. Upon Curlett's death, his son, Alex Curlett, and partner, Charles Gottschalk, took over the completion of the sandstone building. John McLaren, Golden Gate Park's landscape designer, laid out the grounds with hidden nooks and wisteria-covered pergolas. While in Europe promoting international participation in the 1915 World's Fair, Phelan purchased in Granada the splendid antique carved wooden doors that stand at the entry. During this time he arranged for a fine Italian craftsman to come to Montalvo to carve a variety of precious woods in the arched hallway and adjoining library walls.

Late in 1914 the doors to Villa Montalvo opened to its first distinguished guests. During that same year, James Phelan was elected United States Senator, where he served until 1921 when he, a Democrat, was defeated amid the Republican landslide that put Warren Harding in office. Upon his death in 1930 the former senator donated Villa Montalvo to the San Francisco Art Association, along with income to maintain the property as a public park. The buildings and grounds were to be used primarily for the development of art, literature, music, and architecture by promising students. After standing vacant for many years, Villa Montalvo today serves as a center for the arts under the sponsorship of the Montalvo Association. Today, resident artists live and work on the magnificent estate as envisioned years ago by the generous James Duval Phelan.

Villa Montalvo is located at 15400 Montalvo Rd., Saratoga. Grounds are open daily: 8:00am to 5:00pm, Monday-Friday; 9:00am to 5:00pm, Saturday and Sunday; occasionally closed for special events. There is no fee for admission. For additional information call the Montalvo Association at 408-961-5800 or visit their website.

Los Gatos Historic Commercial District

The Los Gatos Historic Commercial District includes the town's earliest commercial intersection and half of the 19th-century commercial center. Important businesses, institutions and civic buildings were all located here. Architectural styles range from Queen Anne and Richardsonian Romanesque, through most of the intervening modes, to Art Deco, all in typical commercial forms with large display windows. Strolling through the streets of this district, you may note the consistent scale and setback of the buildings from the street--nothing exceeds 2-1/2 stories, and many buildings are single-story. There are many excellent examples of architectural styles represented here. The Mission Revival style is represented by the Sorenson Plumbing building on 23 West Main Street, a one-story frame building constructed in 1906. The Fretwell Building at West Main Street and University Avenue is typical of the Romanesque Revival, with the fine detailing in the imitation stone-faced reinforced concrete facade. Built in 1907, it is also a good example of early heavy reinforced concrete construction. The First National Bank of Los Gatos occupied the building from 1912 to 1918.

The stucco-faced Rankin Block (Montebello Building) at 123-149 West Main Street is another example of Mission Revival style architecture. Although two curvilinear parapets have been removed and the storefronts and applied relief ornamentation on the upper floor have been modified, the building is an important visual anchor for the district. It retains the historic tile hip-roofed towers, exterior stucco, fenestration, ornamental window mullions, corner entrance, brick pilasters, vertical divisions, entrance and hallways for the upstairs. The building was constructed in 1902 following a fire on October 13, 1901. The Post Office was located here from 1917 to 1948, and from 1932 until the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake the Chamber of Commerce occupied a portion of the building. The First National Bank Building at the northeast corner of West Main and Santa Cruz Avenue stands as a fine example of Renaissance Revival style architecture. This tall one-story building was constructed in 1920 and was occupied by the First National Bank of Los Gatos until 1955. The lunettes over four windows contain bas relief sculptures of Franciscan Missions. Another noted building at this intersection is the Hofstra Block (La Canada Building- 1-17 North Santa Cruz Avenue). Note the circular bay window with a witch-hat roof projecting out. The Bogart Block (Woodmen's Hall) at 18-20 Santa Cruz Avenue was constructed in 1907. This two-story reinforced concrete building has Classical Revival ornamentation including rusticated pilasters, a modillion cornice, paneled parapet and arched second-story windows. The upstairs was at one time the meeting place for the Woodmen of the World. The second story separated from the first floor in the Loma Prieta earthquake, but was set back together and strengthened without changing the historic appearance.

The Art Deco movement is represented by the Bank of America Building at 160-170 West Main Street. This stucco faced two-story reinforced concrete building was constructed from 1931 to 1932. The Art Deco Style building was occupied by Bank of America until 1963. It was one of the earliest new buildings constructed for the bank after the name changed from Bank of Italy to Bank of America, and includes an enframed window wall composition and a fine zigzag frieze under the ceramic tile roof. On 24 North Santa Cruz Avenue stands the Templeman Hardware Store, a one and one-half story reinforced concrete building in Mission Revival Style with a combed brick parapet, molded accent blocks and green marble splash panels. Arthur W. Templeman had a hardware store here from the time the building was constructed about 1921 until 1966.

The Charles Wagner River Rock Bungalow at 15 University Avenue is the only residential building included in the district. Constructed in the 1920s, the exterior of the one-story bungalow is composed entirely of rounded rock obtained from Los Gatos Creek. The original owner, Charles Wagner, had a barbershop on West Main Street, and Mrs. Alice Wagner conducted her professional photography business here. In the 1930s Jacques Libante resided in the house. In 1934 Libante had his Gem City French Laundry built at the rear of the lot. The Laundry, at 11 University Avenue, is one of Los Gatos' best examples of Art Deco style and was used for a French hand laundry into the 1960s. Today the historic commercial district continues to be a lively commercial center and an important component of local tourism.

The Downtown Commercial Historic District boundaries are Elm St./Old Town Parking lot on the north, Main St. on the south, Los Gatos Creek to the east and North Santa Cruz Ave. on the west. Many of the stores and restaurants are open to the public during normal business hours.

Forbes Mill Annex

The stone building commonly known as Forbes Mill is actually the two-story stone storage annex which was added to the original four-story stone mill building in the fall of 1880. The original "Santa Rosa" Flour Mill building, torn down between 1915 and 1929, was constructed in 1852-54. James Alexander Forbes, former Vice-Counsel in San Francisco for the British Government, came to the Santa Clara Valley in the early 1840s. An educated Scotsman who landed in California in 1831 when he left the whaler ship Fanny, Forbes was involved in real estate deals across the present day Santa Clara County. Recognizing the need for a facility to process the grain of the growing number of farms south of San Jose, Forbes found a convenient spot for a mill near Los Gatos Creek on the Rancho Rinconada de Los Gatos. This site lay astride the old Mission trail between Santa Clara and Santa Cruz. In 1850 he purchased 3,000 acres in the area of the Los Gatos Creek and proceeded to build a mill.

The opening of Forbes Mill in 1854 was an auspicious moment in the history of the Santa Clara Valley. Built on the site of a Mexican rancho amidst the sylvan landscape of the valley, the mill represented the shift of land ownership from the Californio Dons to the new settlers arriving after the Mexican-American War. The first three stories of the mill were built of stone quarried from the Los Gatos Canyon. The top story was wood, cut from trees in the mountains above Los Gatos. In 1880 an annex was attached to the north wall of the mill building. The town that grew around this building was first called Forbes Mill, then Forbestown, and finally Los Gatos. Unfortunately, Forbes knew nothing about flour milling, over extended himself and was forced into bankruptcy. The mill passed from hand to hand until 1870 when a stock company headed by W. S. McMurtry and J. W. McMillen, took it over and made a success of it. It continued as a flour mill until 1887 when it became successively a power plant for the Los Gatos Ice and Power Company, a brewing and bottling company, the Los Gatos Gas Company and finally the P.G. & E. substation for Los Gatos. The mill remained a storehouse for P.G. & E. until after World War II. It was then abandoned and finally in 1971 it was revived as a youth center for Los Gatos. Today the old mill annex operates as a museum, appropriately named the History Museum, Forbes Mill. On June 10, 1950, the California Centennial Commission commemorated the mill's contribution to the State's rich past by designating it as State Historical Landmark number 458.

Forbes Mill is located at 75 Church St., Los Gatos. The History Museum is open from 12:00pm to 4:00pm, Wednesdays-Sundays. It features rotating exhibits and maintains a permanent collection of Los Gatos area memorabilia. Entrance is free. Visit the museum's website or call 408-395-7375 for further information.

Yung See San Fong House

Nestled in the picturesque hills above Los Gatos is the unique and eclectic Yung See San Fong House, a combination of oriental decorative motifs and pagoda roofs together with western massing and layout. Yung See San Fong, "Young's Home in the Heart of the Hills," was completed in 1917 by Ruth Comfort Mitchell Young, a writer, and her husband, Sanborn Young, a gentleman farmer, conservationist and later California State Senator.

Ruth Comfort Mitchell was born in San Francisco in 1882. Summers were spent in Los Gatos, where her parents and grandparents had summer homes. At the age of 14 her first poem was published in the Los Gatos Mail newspaper, thus launching her literary career, which continued throughout her lifetime. In 1914 literary friends in San Francisco introduced Ruth to Sanborn Young. A native of Chicago and a graduate of Northwestern University, Young had recently sold his grain business and was traveling. The couple were married in October 1914 in the Grand Canyon and moved to New York, where Ruth continued her literary pursuits, and he studied photography. In 1916 her play The Sweetmeat Game opened at the Palace Theatre on Broadway starring Olive Wyndham. With a Chinese setting the successful play toured the Orpheum circuit around the country for two years.

Ruth always loved Los Gatos and in 1916 the Youngs started building Yung See San Fong on property granted to them by her parents. The Sweetmeat Game provided her with the inspiration to combine the best of oriental tastes and usage with her conception of beauty and comfort in the building and furnishing of her home. Chinese traditions were adhered to as exemplified by the winding road, which was supposed to deter the devil from finding the house. A statue of the Chinese God of Rice and Plenty still greets visitors at the main gate. Yung See San Fong was basically a self-sustaining farm where vegetables and poultry were raised.

Sanborn Young devoted his energies to politics, photography, raising racing dogs and beagles and investments. In 1925 Young was elected a California State Senator and continued to serve until 1938. A quiet, retiring man, it is said that he won the seat because of his wife's campaigning. While in the Senate his primary interests were the conservation of wild animals and narcotics control. In 1929 his bill to abolish saw-tooth traps was enacted. In the State Senate Sanburn Young was head of the Narcotics Committee and introduced legislation to control narcotics. Because of his expertise President Herbert Hoover appointed Young as one of the United States delegates to the International Conference for the Limitation of the Manufacture of Drugs in 1931, which was held in Geneva, Switzerland. Attended by 55 nations, the resulting treaty was partially drafted by Young. These political ties developed into a close friendship between the Youngs and the Hoovers, who resided in nearby Palo Alto. Among those who frequented Yung See San Fong were movies stars Joan and Constance Bennett, and Senator James Duval Phelan, one time mayor of San Francisco and United StatesSenator, whose nearby residence, Villa Montalvo, was the gathering place for the socially prominent, political and literary notables.

The Yung See San Fong House is located at 16660 Cypress Way, Los Gatos. It is a private residence and not open to the public.

Hayes Mansion

The Hayes Mansion was built in 1905 to replace the original Queen Anne style family home, destroyed by fire in 1899. The 62-room mansion, designed by architect George Page, has been referred to as one of the finest examples of late 19th-century architecture in the Santa Clara Valley. It was intended to be a triple residence for Mary Folsom Hayes Chynoweth and the growing families of her two sons, although Mary died before the house was complete. The elegant, 41,000-square foot Mediterranean Villa is built in the form of a Maltese Cross, a long center section containing an 18-foot wide solarium connecting the south wing with the north wing. A loggia connects the east wing with the west wing. Beautiful craftsmanship, imported marbles and exotic woods decorated its large and airy rooms. Although it is not evident, the walls are double brick with stucco coating. As a result of the fire that destroyed the earlier home, the design of the Hayes Mansion included many fire-safety features. Throughout the house there are fire hose cabinets that connect to water tanks on the third floor. The kitchen was located in a separate building and connected to the mansion with a glass and marble plant conservatory.

Mary Folsom was born in 1825 in upstate New York, one of the younger children in a large family. Even though she had little formal schooling, she educated herself sufficiently to pass the state exams for school teachers. At the age of 27 she had a profound religious experience that changed her life forever. In a most unusual move for a woman of her pre-Civil War era, Mary left teaching and traveled from town to town preaching and healing. Mary's parents migrated to Wisconsin and, two years into her ministry Mary visited them. Her parents were living at the home of newly widowed Anson Hayes, caring for his young daughter. With time Mary and Anson fell in love and Anson asked her to marry him. She agreed after he promised to assist her in her work in any way he could. Anson died when their sons, Everis and Jay, were attending college in Madison, Wisconsin. Mary later remarried a San Jose attorney named Thomas Chynoweth. Both of her sons became practicing attorneys and believed in their mother's powers as strongly as she did.

In December 1882, Mary felt that a higher power had guided her sons and herself to invest in certain lands near Ashland, Wisconsin. After establishing themselves in the mining business in Ashland, the Hayes family decided to migrate to California. Settling at this location, isolated from the core of San Jose, the estate was still the center of Santa Clara County society. The Hayes brothers became early San Jose Mercury publishers, prominent valley politicians, and were actively involved in establishing the Santa Clara Valley fruit industry. The family grew their own fruits and vegetables and raised their own livestock, and the Hayes estate became completely self-sustaining. Electricity was supplied by a power plant on the grounds. The property also included a post office, railroad station, carriage stop, men's dormitory for 40 ranch hands, and a chapel. None of these buildings remain today. The families of the two Hayes brothers lived in the mansion until they sold it in the 1950s, after which the villa remained empty and fell into disrepair. In 1994 the mansion was successfully renovated, and it is now a conference center.

The Hayes Mansion is located at 200 Edenvale Avenue, San Jose. The conference facilities and two restaurants are open to the public, and walking brochures are available from the hotel desk. For further information visit www.hayesconferencecenter.com or call 1-800-420-3200.

New Almaden

Nestled in a canyon 11 miles south of San Jose between the Pueblo Hills and the spurs of the Santa Cruz Mountains sits the tiny village of New Almaden, the once world famous quicksilver mining community that evolved on Jose Reyes Berreyesa's Rancho San Vicente during the early 1850s. This National Historic Landmark district was California's first mining operation--started in 1845, before the major Gold Rush of 1849. Mexican settler Antonio Sunol discovered ore deposits here in the 1820s, identified as quicksilver by Mexican Army officer Andreas Castillero in 1845. Named for the famous Almaden mercury-producing mines in Spain, New Almaden attracted a world-wide interest during the Gold Rush, since mercury was the primary reduction agent of gold and silver. New Almaden became the most prominent quicksilver mine under the operation of Quicksilver Mining Company in the Western Hemisphere. Today, the New Almaden district encompasses the hacienda, homes of the mining community families along the banks of Alamitos Creek, and the Cinnabar Hills where the actual mining operation took place. Important California property laws stemmed from decades of litigation over mining ownership and interests at this site.

The Hacienda along Alamitos Creek was developed into an attractive showplace; it was the gateway to the mines that lay in the hills a half mile down the tree lined Almaden Road. The hacienda included Casa Grande (21350 Almaden Road), the manager's imposing residence, as well as neat rows of cottages owned by the company and rented to supervisory personnel for a nominal fee. Casa Grande was constructed in 1854, under the direction of the mine's general manager, Henry Halleck, who used the building until 1920 as a personal and official residence for the New Almaden Mining Company. John McLaren, of Golden Gate Park fame, assisted in designing the five acres of formally landscaped grounds around the house, which included a picturesque lagoon. A two-teacher school was built in the 1860s on a flat near Casa Grande. Enrollment came chiefly from the Hacienda along with some children from nearby ranches. One of the oldest buildings in the district is the Carson-Perham Adobe, built between 1848 and 1850 by Mexican miners, and later the home of George Carson, the mine company bookkeeper, postmaster, telegraph operator, and Wells Fargo agent. Constance Perham lived in the adobe house for many years and established a private museum there in 1949, the collections of which were purchased in 1983 by Santa Clara County.

The mine and its villages flourished under the 20-year directorship of James Randol, who took over as general manager in 1870 when S. F. Butterworth retired. Under Randol's orderly discipline the community became a mining town unlike any other in the state, somewhat resembling a beneficent feudal society. The residents' health, wealth, cultural and social lives were taken care of by company-sponsored organizations that the progressive but authoritarian Randol set up. After his retirement in 1892 the mine began to decline. Ore yield dropped off by more than half by the turn of the century. In 1912 the Quicksilver Mining Company declared bankruptcy and closed the mine. The hill camps became deserted with only a few old timers staying on in the company houses along the creek at the Hacienda. In 1974 the County of Santa Clara purchased the hills area for development as a county park. It was also the inspiration for the creation of a County Historic District Zoning Ordinance to assure preservation of the mining town. In 1997, the New Almaden Quicksilver Mining Museum was established in Casa Grande. The museum exhibits the collection of Constance Perham, showing blacksmith workings, the history of mercury mining, and the lifestyles of mining communities at New Almaden.

The town of New Almaden is located south of San Jose, off the Almaden Expressway. The Museum is located at 21350 Almaden Rd. and is open Friday, Saturday & Sunday, except for major holidays, 10:00am to 4:00pm (from September-June Friday hours are limited to 12:00pm to 4:00pm). There is no fee for admission, and a walking tour is available. Please call 408-323-1107 for further information, or to arrange a special group or school tour. The Almaden Quicksilver county park, open from 8:00am to sunset, encompasses the mining landscape and several historic buildings.

Villa Mira Monte

Listed in the National Register of Historic Places, Villa Mira Monte, the Morgan Hill House, is an elegant but simple historic house that incorporates features of Queen Anne and Stick/Eastlake design. Hiram Morgan Hill built the house for his bride, Diana Murphy Hill in the 1880s. The property is between Monterey Street (part of the historic El Camino Real) and the Southern Pacific Railroad. The Hill’s “country cottage” sits on what was a rancho inherited from Diana’s father Daniel Murphy, a parcel of land that overlooks “Murphy’s Peak,” now known as El Toro Mountain.

Diana was the granddaughter of Martin Murphy Sr. and daughter of Daniel Murphy – each members of the Townsend, Murphy and Stephens wagon train party that crossed into California in 1844 and blazed the trail at Truckee in the Sierra Nevada now the route of the Southern Railroad and the Interstate Highway 80.

Hiram and Diana and their only daughter Diane lived in San Francisco and used the house as a country retreat for themselves and to entertain their many friends who would often come to visit. In fact, the town acquired its name because train conductors would call out, "Morgan Hill's" when making special stops for the Hill's guests to disembark.

The Hills sold the house in 1913, and it subsequently saw use as a private home, a funeral parlor, and an antique shop. In 1992, Villa Mira Monte was deeded to the Morgan Hill Historical Society with the proviso that it be rescued from dereliction and be made available to the public in some way. The Historical Society rehabilitated the house over a five-year period and re-opened its doors in 1998.

Villa Mira Monte, the Morgan Hill House, is located just north of the downtown area at 17860 Monterey St., Morgan Hill, CA. The grounds of the Villa Mira Monte are open daily to pedestrians; there is no on-site parking.  The Morgan Hill House is open for self-guided tours on Fridays, 12pm-3pm and Saturdays, 10am-1pm; occasionally closed for special events. The house and grounds also may be rented for weddings, parties, and other private events. The Morgan Hill House and Museum at Villa Mira Monte are operated by the Morgan Hill Historical Society; for more information, contact the Morgan Hill House and Museum at (408) 779-5755, Event Planning (408)779-6992, Email: info@mhhistoricalsociety.org  or visit their website.

Learn More

By clicking on one of these links, you can go directly to a particular section:
Bibliography for Santa Clara County, California
Children's Literature
Links to Santa Clara County Lexington Tourism and Preservation
Links to Sites Listed in the Santa Clara Travel Itinerary

Bibliography for Santa Clara County, California

Butler, Phyllis Filiberti; with architectural supplement by the Junior League of San Jose. The Valley of Santa Clara: Historic Buildings, 1792-1920. Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1981.

Cringely, Robert X. Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date. New York: Harperbusiness, 1996.

English-Lueck, J. A. Cultures@Silicon. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Federal Writers' Project (sponsored by Mabel R. Gillis, California State Librarian). California: A Guide to the Golden State. New York: Hastings House, 1939, reprinted 1972.

Finn, Christine. Artifacts: an Archaeologist's Year in Silicon Valley. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001.

Gebhard, David, and [others]. A Guide to Architecture in San Francisco & Northern California. Santa Barbara, CA: Peregrine Smith, Inc., 1973.

Goodell, Jeff. Sunnyvale: The Rise and Fall of a Silicon Valley Family. New York: Random House, 2000.

Gromov, Gregory R. History of Internet and WWW: The Roads and Crossroads of Internet History posted at http://www.netvalley.com/intval.html

Honnold, Dierdre W. with illustrations by Katy Hardeay and D.W. Honnold. San Jose with Kids: a Family Guide to the Greater San Jose and Santa Clara Valley Area. Carmichael, CA: Wordwrights International, 1995.

Jacobson, Yvonne. Passing Farms, Enduring Values: California's Santa Clara. Los Altos, Calif.: W. Kaufmann in cooperation with the California History Center, De Anza College, Cupertino, California, 1984.

Kirker, Harold. California's Architectural Frontier: Style and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. Salt Lake City, UT: Peregrine Smith Books, 1986.

Lukes, Timothy J. and Gary Y. Okihiro. Japanese Legacy: Farming and Community Life in California's Santa Clara Valley. Cupertino, Calif.: California History Center, De Anza College, 1985.

McLaughlin, John and Carol Whiteley. Technology, Entrepreneurs, and Silicon Valley. Palo Alto, CA: Santa Clara Valley Historical Association, 2002.

Rambo, F. Ralph. Pioneer Blue Book of the Old Santa Clara Valley. San Jose, Calif.: Rosicrucian Press, 1973.

Richards, Sally. Silicon Valley: Sand Dreams & Silicon Orchards. Carlsbad, Calif.: Heritage Media Corp., 2000.

Sexton, Jean Deitz. Silicon Valley: Inventing the Future: a Contemporary Portrait. Chatsworth, Calif.: Windsor Publications, 1991.

Staff of the Garden City Women's Club (San Jose, Calif.). History of Black Americans in Santa Clara Valley. Sunnyvale, Calif.: Lockheed Missiles & Space Co., 1978.

Steinberg, Goodwin B. with Susan Wolfe. From the Ground Up: Building Silicon Valley. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Winslow, Ward, ed. The Making of Silicon Valley: A One Hundred Year Renaissance. Palo Alto, CA: Santa Clara Valley Historical Association, 1996.

Woodbridge, Sally Byrne. California Architecture: Historic American Buildings Survey. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1988.

Children's Literature

Stevenson, James (Editor), and Don Duncan (Editor). California Missions - History and Model Building Ideas for Children. Santa Barbara CA: Bellerophon Books, 1993.

Schanzer, Rosalyn (Editor). Gold Fever! Tales From the California Gold Rush. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1999.

Ingram, Scott and Jean Craven. California, the Golden State (World Almanac Library of the States). Milwaukee, WI: World Almanac Education, 2002.

Schwarzkopf, Chet and Wayne Trimm (Illustrator). Heart of the Wild: Animal Stories of the California Redwood Coast. Christchurch, New Zealand: Caxton Press, 2000.

Links to Santa Clara County Tourism and Preservation

City of Santa Clara, California
The city's official website provides further information on the celebration of Santa Clara's Sesquicentennial, and other events and city serivces.

California Office of Historic Preservation Department of Parks and Recreation
Preserving and enhancing California's irreplaceable historic heritage as a matter of public interest so that its vital legacy of cultural, educational, recreational, aesthetic, economic, social, and environmental benefits will be maintained and enriched for present and future generations.

California Historical Society
This statewide membership-based organization is dedicated to engaging the public's interest and participation in collecting, preserving, and presenting art, artifacts, and written materials relevant to the history of California and to support historical research, publication, and educational activities.

California Tourism
Get started on your California adventure at this website brought to you by the California Division of Tourism.

Silicon Valley Gateway
Guide to Tourist Attractions at www.netview.com/svg/tourist/winchest/

Santa Clara County Historical and Genealogical Society
The SCCHGS was formed in 1957 as a nonprofit educational organization to promote the study of history and genealogy in Santa Clara County. Visit their website at www.rootsweb.com/~cascchgs

Santa Clara Chamber of Commerce/Santa Clara Convention Center
The source for Santa Clara attractions, accomodations and restaurants.

Santa Clara County Parks & Recreation
Protecting and preserving regional parklands for the enjoyment, education and inspiration of this and future generations.

History San José
This organization involves diverse audiences in exploring the varieties of human experience that contribute to the continuing history of San José and the Santa Clara Valley, and cares for a collection of over half a million objects that collectively help tell the story of the Santa Clara Valley.

San Jose Convention & Visitors Bureau
An excellent resource and travel guide for San Jose.

Preservation Action Council of San Jose
The PACSJ is a nonprofit organization promoting programs and policies for historic preservation and good urban architectural design.

Palo Alto Chamber of Commerce
Find out about events happening in Palo Alto and helpful visitor information.

Palo Alto Stanford Heritage
A nonprofit organization promoting the preservation of historic architecture in the Palo Alto-Stanford area.

Sunnyvale Chamber of Commerce
A source for Sunnyvale events and information.

The Muwekma Ohlone
Learn about the history and current affairs affecting the Muwekma Ohlone, the descendants of Santa Clara's original inhabitants.

Victorian Preservation Association of Santa Clara Valley
Members of the Victorian Preservation Association of Santa Clara Valley, a non-profit organization, share an interest in the older buildings of our community, especially turn-of-the-century homes.

National Trust for Historic Preservation
Learn about the programs of and membership in the oldest national nonprofit preservation organization.

Historic Hotels of America
A feature of the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Heritage Traveler program that provides information on historic hotels and package tours in the vicinity of this itinerary, including the Hotel Sainte Claire in San Jose.

National Scenic Byways Program
This website, maintained by the U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, includes information on state and nationally designated byway routes throughout America based on their archeological, cultural, historic, natural, recreational, and scenic qualities. Visit the America’s Byways Ebbetts Pass Scenic Byway website for more ideas.

Links to Sites Listed in the Santa Clara Travel Itinerary

• Hanna-Honeycomb House
• Naval Air Station Sunnyvale /Moffett Field Museum
• De Anza Hotel
• Luis Maria Peralta Adobe
• Hotel Sainte Claire
• New Almaden
• Villa Montalvo
  
• Winchester Mystery House
• Le Petit Trianon
• Picchetti Brothers Winery
• Paul Masson Mountain Winery
• Villa Montalvo
• Forbes Mill Annex
• Hayes Mansion

Credits

Santa Clara County: California's Historic Silicon Valley, was produced by the National Park Service (NPS), U.S. Department of the Interior, in cooperation with the City of Santa Clara, the California Office of Historic Preservation, and the National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers (NCSHPO). It was created under the direction of Carol D. Shull, Keeper of the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service, Patrick Andrus, Heritage Tourism Program Manager, and Beth L. Savage, Publications Program Manager. Santa Clara County: California's Historic Silicon Valley, is based on information in the files of the National Register of Historic Places and National Historic Landmarks collections. These materials are kept at 800 North Capitol St., Washington, D.C., and are open to the public from 8:00am to 12:00pm and 1:00pm to 4:00pm, Monday through Friday.

Judith Silva, Associate Planner for the City of Santa Clara, conceptualized the itinerary and provided written and photographic materials. National Register web production team members included Jeff Joeckel, who designed the itinerary, Rustin Quaide, and Shannon Bell (all of NCSHPO). Contextual essays were written by Rustin Quaide (Early History & Economic Development), Shannon Bell (Bay Area Architecture), and Judith Silva (Preservation). Special thanks to History San José and Lorie Garcia for their photograph contributions.