This Tour has been cancelled. 

Tour D - Before High Tech, Valley of Heart's Delight

Focus

This tour will concentrate on the food industry, the industry that dominated the Santa Clara Valley economy until the post war era. Sites include heritage orchards, food processing plant sites, and sites of business that serviced food processing such as can manufacturing, paper milling and label making.

The only evidence of the agriculture heritage of what’s now called Silicon Valley (almost a misnomer now)  is in the names of the roads – like Blossom Valley Road and Pruneridge Avenue. The names of other major roads are the names of Rancheros like Berryessa and Pacheco, and farmers like Gish and Story.

History San José - Fruit Barn

The tour informally starts on Thursday evening, May 29, as during the opening reception at History San José, the Fruit Barn will be open with it's exhibit entitled "Valley of Heart's Delight".  This exhibit gives an overall orientation to the tour.

Lick Mill Historic Site

The earliest commercial agriculture was wheat farming and there are remnants of several historic mills in the area. There is the Vallejo Flour Mill in Fremont (1853). Los Gatos has Forbes Mill (1854), which is now a museum.

One of the most colorful stories belongs to the site of the former Lick Mill in Santa Clara, our first stop on this tour. The site, which contains the house and the old granary, is stuck in the middle of an apartment complex, so you need to know how to find it. 

The James Lick story is fascinating. The long (better) version is here. He was born in Fredericksburg, Pennsylvania, called Stumpstown at the time, in 1796 and began as an apprentice cabinet maker. After putting a young girl into a “family way” in 1817, he attempted to do the right thing, but girl’s father, a mill owner, rebuffed him because he wasn’t rich. He moved to Baltimore and took up piano making. In 1821, hearing that pianos were being imported to South America, he moved to Argentina. Returning from a trip to Europe, the boat he was on was captured in was and he became a POW in present day Uruguay, but later he escaped and returned to Buenos Aires on foot. By 1832, he had amassed a fortune and returned home, only to find that his old love had married many years before and didn’t want to see him. He returned to South America, living in both Chile and Peru. In late 1847 he sailed to California, arriving in January with his tools, $30,000 in gold and 600 pounds of chocolate from his friend Domingo Ghirardelli. He sold the chocolate quickly and advised his friend of the opportunity. He bought up a lot of land quickly, just before the Gold Rush.

At 58, he left his San Francisco businesses with an agent and moved to the mill site, living in a cabin. He spent a fortune building the mill, which came to known as the “Mahogany Mill” and “Lick’s Folly”. On completion, he sent pictures to Stumpstown to prove that he had a better mill. He sent for his son, John, whom he had never met and they shared the cabin near the mill. To try to please John, he built the mansion, but John preferred the cabin where he stayed for eight years before moving briefly to Alviso (part of the tour) before returning to Pennsylvania. Lick himself lost interest and didn’t finish furnishing the mansion. Lick returned to San Francisco where he built a fine hotel, the Lick House, which was destroyed in the Great Fire that followed the 1906 earthquake. He was generous in his own way – one project he had planned to give San José was a replica of the conservatory at Kew Gardens, but he never had it uncrated when he was miffed by a local newspaper. After his death the pieces were purchased by a group in San Francisco who made from them the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park. At his death he was one of the richest men in the state, including ownership of all of Catalina Island. He bequeathed funds to build Lick Observatory above San José, where he is buried. A section of Highway 101 (please don’t say “The 101” in Northern California) in the city of San Francisco is called The James Lick Freeway and there are several other places bearing his name.

According to the book, “The Valley of Santa Clara – Historic Buildings, 1792-1920” by Phyllis Filiberti Butler, 1975, Published by the Junior League, Lick put the mill up for sale when John left California.  The asking price was $250,000.  There were no takers since the yearly rains usually flooded the property.  In 1873 he gave the mill to the Thomas Paine Society in Boston, which immediately sold it for only $18,000.  By then, the valley had converted from wheat growing to orchards, so the new owners, Pfister and Waterman, converted the mill to paper making.  Much of the paper produced was the specialized paper for wrapping fruit for shipment.

About a mile north of the mill is an interesting city park, Ulistac, where Santa Clara is preserving a stretch of the Guadalupe River and restoring it to a riparian environment.  (But I digress…)

Alviso – Thomas Foon Chew & Bay Side Cannery

Alviso, located at the bottom of San Francisco Bay, was the original port for the Santa Clara Valley is the next stop on the tour.  Township description 1860 & 1870 Census is at this site.  Here's another good resource.

Alviso was acquired, rather controversially, by the City of San José in 1968.  Before the Gold Rush, it serviced Mission Santa Clara, San José, and the New Almaden mines (but that is a different tour).  Before the railroad came through in 1864, steamboats came down the bay, both for trade and as ferries. 

As agriculture developed, the ground water was overused and the Northern part of the Valley, including Alviso, subsided, taking the land below sea level.  Levies promised in the original "consolidation" into San José have only been completed in the last several years.  Also the Bay itself silted up due to the salt ponds built near Redwood City and Fremont.  (The ponds are being removed over time, and the lower bay is being restored, but that’s also another story…)

One other aside – in 1890 “New Chicago” was platted out in Alviso, a scheme of P. H. Wheeler to recover when his watch-making business failed in San Diego.  The new factory in Alviso was only in operation for one day!

That same year, Sai Yin-Chew opened Precita Cannery in San Francisco.  He moved to Alviso following the 1906 Earthquake, renaming it to be The Bay Side Cannery.  He started at the site of the Wheeler Watch Company.  His son, Thomas Foon Chew joined his father in the business the first year, eventually taking over.  He built boarding houses for 100 Chinese workers.  Other workers commuted in from Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mountain View and Milpitas during the canning season.

It became the third largest cannery in the world after Libby and DelMonte.  Chew built the levy to protect the property.  He was called the “Asparagus King” for first canning it.  He added canneries at Mayfield (California St. of Palo Alto) and in the Delta.  Products canned in Alviso included spinach, asparagus, cherries, apricots, plums, peaches, pears, tomatoes, catsup, tomato sauce, hot sauce, tomato puree, fish sauce, and fruit cocktail.  As the business grew, people of other ancestries were hired in the 1920s  – Italian, Portuguese, and “Hindu”.

He was the first Chinese man in California to join the masons.  He was the third richest man in California when he died in 1931 at the age of 42.  The cannery was closed in 1936.

The cannery itself is a wonderful ruin, showing the expansions that were made to the building over time.  There are a total of seven extant buildings that were part of the property.

http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/5views/5views3h6.htm

http://www.sanjose.com/underbelly/unbelly/Alviso/alviso12.html

Sunnyvale - Heritage Orchard and the Libby Cannery

As this is written, the Sunnyvale Heritage Museum, currently in a park that was built on the site of Murphy Mansion (the first home in Sunnyvale), is in the process of moving to the Civic Center near the heritage orchard and display.  http://heritageparkmuseum.org/museum.html

This museum currently houses historic pictures and a display of canning implements.  The new museum is a reconstruction of the historic home.  It should be complete by the time of the Conference

The Heritage Orchard, which is an apricot orchard, has a display on Sunnyvale’s agricultural past and on fruit drying, packing and canning.  http://www.svcn.com/archives/sunnyvalesun/05.19.99/cover-9920.html

A drive-by is the site of the original Libby McNeil Libby Cannery started in 1906, once the largest cannery in the world.  The only thing that remains is the water tower.  http://www.roadsideamerica.com/tips/getAttraction.php3?tip_AttractionNo==222

A general history of the industry in Sunnyvale is in this 1922 document: http://www.mariposaresearch.net/santaclararesearch/SV.html

Overall Sunnyvale timeline is at this site:

http://sunnyvale.ca.gov/Departments/Library/Timeline.htm

This picture of children in the worker housing is in a set of lantern slides from all over California taken in the early 20^th century.

http://geoimages.berkeley.edu/GeoImages/LanternSlides/BayArea/NC-M-11.html

If there is time, a stop at the Olson Cherry Stand is recommended.  The family began growing cherries in 1902 and opened the stand in 1931.  The original stand was torn down for development in 2002, but a new one was constructed.

http://www.cjolsoncherries.com/aboutus.htm

http://www.svcn.com/archives/sunnyvalesun/01.30.02/cover-0205.html

Del Monte Cannery

We’ll drive by two new condominium developments that have just been erected on old cannery land just west of downtown San José.  At the old Del Monte Plant on Auzerais, the water tower and some walls have been left standing.  At ‘Del Monte 51’ near the train station, the developer incorporated some of the brick walls into the units after pressure to do so.  The CalPak Manager’s Office at 734 The Alameda is a City historic site.

http://www.preservation.org/delmonte/delmonte.html

The Del Monte Cannery was the last cannery open in San José.

A promo film for Del Monte –

http://www.archive.org/details/GoldenHa1950

Japantown Area -

Heinlenville, Mariani, Continental Can, Gordon Biersch, Tri Valley Packing

(Japantown is also a tour on Thursday and on Sunday morning.)

San José's Japantown (Nihonmachi in Japanese) is one of only three remaining Japantowns in the US.   The area has deep industrial roots, though only traces remain, so we’ll need to use imagination to envisage the bustling activity at harvest time as the area was a center of the canning and food industries.

Heinlenville was a Chinatown built for the San José Chinese after the main Chinatown was burned in an arson fire.  There is a commemorative plaque on the Fairmont Hotel for the original town, but the site of Heinlenville until recently was a Maintenance Yard for the City of San José, bounded by Taylor, Jackson, Sixth and Seventh Streets.  Heinlenville was shut down due to failure to pay taxes in 1931.  Redevelopment of the block has just begun. A reconstruction of the Ng Shing Gung Temple from Heinlenville is at History San José.  More information on Heinlenville is at http://www.chcp.org/heinlen.html

http://www.sjsu.edu/depts/commstudies/woz/paper1fall.html

The Japanese American Museum San José (JAMsj) is located on Fifth Street, but is closed to the public as a new building is being constructed.

Mariani Packing site is now occupied by two townhouse projects.  Here are pictures of the site just as it was being demolished in 2001.  Although some of the buildings are well preserved, there is no signage.  The water tower has been adaptively reused as a cell phome tower.  

The company is now located in Vacaville.  History of the family and company - http://www.mariani.com/about.html

Continental Can and Tri Valley Cannery operated on 10^th Street north of Taylor.  There are remnants, including the "bridge to nowhere".  Redevelopment is in the works. There are other sites where a can manufacturing plant is located adjacent to a cannery, such as the 3rd and Keyes block.  It was difficult and costly to transport empty cans very far.

Gordon Biersch, a modern lager brewery is on Taylor St.   It is no longer affiliated with the Gordon Biersch Restaurant in downtown San José but they do serve Gordon Biersch beer there.  A nice Märtzen after the tour is recommended. 

FMC – Food Machinery Corporation

There isn’t much to see on the old property, which is now owned by BAE Systems, so the tour will be a drive-by.  It all started with John Bean’s force pump and the Bean Spray Pump Company.  His grandson, John David Crummey built up the business, and was the founder of Food Machinery Corporation by joining with Anderson-Barngrover. 

http://www.fmctechnologies.com/History.aspx

http://www.fmc.com/Corporate/FMCHistory/tabid/730/Default.aspx?PageContentID=13

Food Machinery provided a wide variety of machines for the growing and processing of fruit and vegetables. During the War, Food Machinery switched over to constructing LTVs, very near downtown on West Julian.  This site shows the remains of that plant. 

The name changed to FMC in 1961.  Headquarters moved to Chicago in 1971.  The Bradley Fighting Vehicle was manufactured here in San José.  In aerial photos , one can clearly see the figure-8 shaped test track for the Bradley.