Post card photograph from the Los Gatos Weekly-Times files.
The north façade of Stanford University was constructed with stone from the Greystone Quarry.
Early in June, this space, with an assist from historian Bill Wulf, told of young rowdies bugging engineers and brakemen in the local railroad yard and of heavy drinkers disrupting Sunset Park in the mountains near Wrights Station. Alcohol was not served at the park, but the bring-your-own-bottle crowd was so drunken that the RR closed the park and opened another Sunset Park off San Jose-Almaden Mines Road, not far from Greystone Quarry where stone was purchased for the building of Stanford University.
And now comes a rare coincidence.
Preceding me by a couple of weeks in the chair of dental surgeon Kenneth D. Follmar II was 90-year-old Richard Pfeiffer, grandson of the founder of Greystone Quarry. Follmar, a Los Gatos High School graduate and local history buff, wondered about the quarry and how it fits into local history.
A phone call to the Pfeiffer home on Almaden Road brought on Richard's brother, 92-year-old Norbert Pfeiffer, who told the story of his grandfather, Jacob, a stonemason, coming to Santa Clara Valley from Chicago and purchasing the Greystone Quarry and entering the building business. Brick masonry was the building method of the day, and Jacob Pfeiffer built the the San Jose Post Office (still standing) and the United States Mint in Carson City.
Now, along comes Leland Stanford (1824-93), a can-do sort of guy from New York who sold hardware in Sacramento to miners headed to the gold fields. Stanford became governor, then a U.S. senator, a builder of Central Pacific RR and Southern Pacific RR.
The railroads became powerful and for many years, the state of California was run not from Sacramento, but from the SP business offices upstairs in the San Francisco depot at Third and Townsend streets, where later, Los Gatos commuters would pass twice a day.
It was the death of his young son that inspired Stanford to build Leland Stanford Junior University (the Junior was later dropped).
Building of the university was put to bid, and although the Pfeiffer firm was not low, Stanford insisted on greystone, so he purchased it from Jacob Pfeiffer and built a rail line into the quarry. Wulf added that Stanford also built a railway station near the quarry and, with a tremor in his voice, he added that to his knowledge there was never a photograph taken of the station. The station accommodated SP passengers who visited transplanted Sunset Park.
Building rail lines was all in a day's work for Stanford. When building his university, he simply constructed a rail line from Palo Alto to his farm, which today contains the university and land to spare for electronic companies and commercial frontage along El Camino Real.
Horse lovers may think of The Farm as the place where a series of cameras was set up to photograph a running horse to disprove the myth that a running horse had at least one hoof on the ground at all times. Or, if you are a golfer, you may have played or hope to play a round at the championship layout.
Sunset Park near Greystone Quarry existed from 1880 until the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.
The Pfeiffer brothers, Richard and Norbert, bless 'em both, reside on the family Almaden Road properties.
Up against prestigious University of California, early registration lagged at Stanford, and agents were sent far afield to recruit students. It was thus that future president Herbert Hoover, living in Oregon with a land-promoting uncle, was recruited.
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, July 24, 1996.
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