Los Gatos Weekly-Times file photograph

Prune and other fruit orchards like this one in Los Gatos once filled the valley with their showy blossoms.

Picture from the Past

Valley has much to celebrate with its heritage of orchards

By John S. Baggerly

'The hardest work I ever had was picking the prunes," said John Howes, a Los Gatos orchardist.

Howes was one of the speakers at Santa Clara Valley's Orchard Heritage Blossom Faire & Barbecue on May 22 at Orchard Heritage Park, next to the Sunnyvale Community Center. The event featured the Santa Clara Valley Orchard Family Celebration, hosted by Paul Bernal, chairman of the Santa Clara County Historical Heritage Commission and himself a descendant of one of the county's oldest orchard families.

The gathering was somewhat like a meeting of Quakers (Society of Friends)--speaking when the Spirit moves you. In this case, it was old-time orchardists reminiscing about the past. There were also numerous attendees whose roots are deep in the orchard soil that made the entire Santa Clara Valley an ocean of white and pink each spring when fruit trees were in bloom.

John Howes' family owned 160 acres of prunes along Los Gatos-Almaden Road. Howes recalled learning to drive a car during the early 1950s and having lots of orchard roads to practice on between San Jose's Willow Glen area and his grandparents' farm in Saratoga.

In last week's column, Margaret Ross told of her family starting Los Gatos cemetery and herself learning to drive a car on cemetery roads. Others may recall letting their driver-ready youngsters practice on the parking area bordering Los Gatos High School's athletic facilities.

Saratoga's Garrod Farms, begun by the late Vince S. Garrod, has a 100-year history and is still 120 acres of pasture, vineyards, and horse boarding and riding facilities.

The William Cilker family began fruit farming in 1907 with 186 acres of prune, apricot and walnut trees at Los Gatos Boulevard and Blossom Hill Road. It was the present Cilker family members who made land available for the building of Community Hospital of Los Gatos.

Thoroughfares such as Pollard and Marion roads owe their names to local pioneers like W. D. Pollard, who subdivided his land in 1891. These orchard people and other seniors remember when the entire Santa Clara Valley was truly "The Valley of Heart's Delight"--full of blossoms in spring and busy canneries in the fall, which supplied hundreds of Valley residents with employment. Los Gatos and Campbell had a good share of canneries, which were often built with loading docks on railroad lines. During harvest time, schools sometimes delayed opening so students could help their families pick fruit.

It was this mountain-to-mountain sea of white that sustained the annual Saratoga Blossom Festival until World War II. The Festival was started by Rev. Edwin Sydney "Everlasting Sunshine" Williams (1837-1918), who in the spring of 1899, following the welcome end of two years of disastrous drought, conceived the idea of a Saratoga Blossom Festival, a community celebration of springtime thanksgiving.

"Bring your gentlest horse," Williams used to advertise, as locals conveyed visitors via horse-drawn vehicles. In the 1920s, the spreading city of San Jose tried to usurp the Festival, but the press of Saratoga and Los Gatos denounced the idea and eventually turned San Jose away.

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Picture From the Past: Orchard heritage

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