The first documented inhabitants included the Ohlone, residing on Coyote Creek and Calaveras Creek, although Santa Clara Valley undoubtedly had known earlier Indian inhabitants and migrations, now lost to history and prehistory. Archaeological discoveries place Ohlone 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 Joaquin River Delta region, 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".[1]
Europeans arrive
The European presence in the region began with the Spanish explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, The arrival of the Spanish 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 to 1841. José de Gálvez, the visitor-general of New Spain, 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" ("Plain of the Oaks") in 1769 as he scouted the region on the behalf of Captain Gaspar de Portolà.[1]
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 offered rest for the travelers from Monterey and San Francisco. Although Mexicobroke 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. The time of the Californios, the rural land owning gentlemen, was short lived in California, however. American immigrants began arriving in California, followed by the Mexican–American War.[1]
Transition to U.S. territory
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 California Gold Rush 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.[1]
San Jose became the first capital of the state of California and the first California State Legislature convened there on December 15, 1849. Santa Clara County was one of the original counties of California, formed at the time of statehood. 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 1855 a small town, originally named McCarthysville, but later named Saratoga, came into existence 12 miles (19km) 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 Stevens 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 Scottish settler John Gilroy, who wed Maria Clara, granddaughter of the man who claimed San Francisco for Spain in 1769.[1]
In 1849 Martin Murphy, Jr. controlled six[which?] of Santa Clara's largest ranchos. After Murphy's death real estate developer W. E. Crossman purchased 200 acres (0.81km2) 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.[1]
Economic growth
Santa Clara County was linked to the world by the railroads and 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 Ferry-Morse Seed Company, founded by Charles Copeland Morse, became the world's largest flower and vegetable seed producer.[1][2]
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.[dubious–discuss] 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.[3]rancho san antonio.
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.[3]
Industrialization
With the establishment of Stanford University, 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 converters, largely the work of Cyril Frank 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.[3]
Already in the 1930s the US military saw the strategic advantages of Santa Clara Valley. Admiral William A. Moffett, appointed by President Warren G. 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. Northern California politicians, realizing the opportunities to be created, seized the initiative from San Diego, California, and money was found to purchase the 1,750 acres (7.1km2) of what would become Moffett Federal Airfield. Two Naval Air Stations were commissioned in the early 1930s to port the two US 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."[3]
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, with a population rise of 10% in one decade (1980–1990). Santa Clara County was, by 2000, home to 1,682,585 and still growing. Santa Clara (1939 population 6,303), Mountain View (1939 population 3,308) and other Santa Clara County 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 United States Census, although the city had a population of 443,950. By 1990 San Jose's population reached 782,248 people, according to the census, and was the 11th most populated city in the nation, surpassing San Francisco in population.[3]
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.[3]
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. 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.[3]
In 1953, William Shockley left Bell Labs in a disagreement over the handling of the invention of the transistor. After returning to California Institute of Technology for a short while, in 1956 Shockley moved to Mountain View, California, and created Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. Unlike many other researchers who used germanium as the semiconductor material, Shockley believed that silicon was the better material for making transistors. Shockley intended to replace the current transistor with a new three-element design (today known as the Shockley diode), but the design was considerably more difficult to build than the "simple" transistor. In 1957, Shockley decided to end research on the silicon transistor. As a result, the "traitorous eight" engineers left the company to form Fairchild Semiconductor. Two of the original employees of Fairchild Semiconductor, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, would go on to found Intel.[4] In 1971, Intel created the first microprocessor, the Intel 4004. 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 Jobs' garage in Cupertino, Wozniak and Jobs formed Apple Computer. By 1976 Apple's first personal computer, the Apple I, was being sold.[3]
Even after the collapse of the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s, "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. 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 State University leads the field in supplying these industries with more engineering graduates than all other colleges combined.[3]
The San Francisco Peninsula is a peninsula in the San Francisco Bay Area that separates San Francisco Bay from the Pacific Ocean. On its northern tip is the City and County of San Francisco. Its southern base is Mountain View, in Santa Clara County, south of Palo Alto and north of Sunnyvale and Los Altos. Most of the Peninsula is occupied by San Mateo County, between San Francisco and Santa Clara counties, and including the cities and towns of Atherton, Belmont, Brisbane, Burlingame, Colma, Daly City, East Palo Alto, El Granada, Foster City, Hillsborough, Half Moon Bay, La Honda, Loma Mar, Los Altos, Menlo Park, Millbrae, Pacifica, Palo Alto, Pescadero, Portola Valley, Redwood City, San Bruno, San Carlos, San Mateo, South San Francisco, and Woodside.
Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that is a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical area of the Santa Clara Valley. The term "Silicon Valley" refers to the area in which high-tech business has proliferated in Northern California, and it also serves as a general metonym for California's high-tech business sector.
Palo Alto is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto.
Cupertino is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States, directly west of San Jose on the western edge of the Santa Clara Valley with portions extending into the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The population was 60,381 as of the 2020 census. The city is widely known for being the home of Apple Inc., headquartered within the city at Apple Park.
Santa Clara is a city in the county of the same name. The city's population was 127,647 at the 2020 census, making it the eighth-most populous city in the Bay Area. Located in the southern Bay Area, the city was founded by the Spanish in 1777 with the establishment of Mission Santa Clara de Asís under the leadership of Junípero Serra.
Sunnyvale is a city located in the Santa Clara Valley in northwest Santa Clara County in the U.S. state of California.
The Santa Clara Valley is a geologic trough in Northern California that extends 90 miles (140 km) south–southeast from San Francisco to Hollister. The longitudinal valley is bordered on the west by the Santa Cruz Mountains and on the east by the Diablo Range; the two coastal ranges meet south of Hollister. The San Francisco Bay borders the valley to the north, and fills much of the northern third of the valley. The valley floor is an alluvial plain that formed in the graben between the San Andreas Fault to the west and the Hayward and Calaveras faults to the east. Within the valley and surrounding the bay on three sides are the urban communities of San Mateo County, Santa Clara County, and Alameda County, while the narrow southern reaches of the valley extend into rural San Benito County to Hollister. In practical terms, the central portion of the Santa Clara Valley is often considered by itself, contained entirely within Santa Clara County.
The Diocese of San José in California is a Latin Church ecclesiastical territory, or diocese, of the Catholic Church in Santa Clara County in California in the United States. It is a suffragan diocese of the metropolitan Archdiocese of San Francisco.
The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, more commonly known simply as the Valley Transportation Authority (VTA), is a special district responsible for public transit services, congestion management, specific highway improvement projects, and countywide transportation planning for Santa Clara County, California. It serves San Jose, California, and the surrounding Silicon Valley. It is one of the governing parties for the Caltrain commuter rail line that serves the county. In 2022, the VTA's public transportation services had a combined ridership of 21,381,600, or about 84,800 per weekday as of the third quarter of 2023.
Saren Joseph Simitian is an American politician. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the State Senator representing California's 11th State Senate district, which encompasses all or part of 13 cities in San Mateo, Santa Clara, and Santa Cruz counties, from 2004 to 2012. Approaching his term limit at the end of 2012, he ran for and was elected as a Santa Clara County Supervisor. He was re-elected to the same seat in 2016 and again in 2020.
The Peninsular Railway was an interurban electrified railway in the U.S. State of California in the United States of America. It served the area between San Jose, Los Gatos, and Palo Alto, comprising much of what is today known as "Silicon Valley". For much of its existence it was a subsidiary of the Southern Pacific Railroad.
San Jose, California, is the third largest city in the state, and the largest of all cities in the San Francisco Bay Area and Northern California, with a population of 1,021,795.
The media in the San Francisco Bay Area has historically focused on San Francisco but also includes two other major media centers, Oakland and San Jose. The Federal Communications Commission, Nielsen Media Research, and other similar media organizations treat the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose Area as one entire media market. The region hosts to one of the oldest radio stations in the United States still in existence, KCBS (AM) (740 kHz), founded by engineer Charles Herrold in 1909. As the home of Silicon Valley, the Bay Area is also a technologically advanced and innovative region, with many companies involved with Internet media or influential websites.
The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a region of California centered around the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun estuaries in Northern California. The Association of Bay Area Governments defines the Bay Area as including the nine counties that border the aforementioned estuaries: Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, Sonoma, and San Francisco. Other definitions may be either smaller or larger, and may include neighboring counties that do not border the aforementioned estuaries, such as the Central Coast counties of Santa Cruz, San Benito, and Monterey, or the Central Valley counties of San Joaquin, Merced, and Stanislaus.
Rancho Rincon de San Francisquito was a 8,418-acre (34.07 km2) Mexican land grant in present-day Santa Clara County, California given in 1841 by Governor Juan Alvarado to José Peña. The name means "corner or bend of the San Francisquito" referring to San Francisquito Creek. The grant extended along Matadero Creek to the hills and included the southern part of present-day Palo Alto and the southern part of the Stanford University campus.
Adobe Creek, historically San Antonio Creek, is a 14.2-mile-long (22.9 km) northward-flowing stream originating on Black Mountain in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It courses through the cities of Los Altos Hills, Los Altos, and Palo Alto on its way to the Palo Alto Flood Basin and thence to southwestern San Francisco Bay in Santa Clara County, California, United States. Historically, Adobe Creek was a perennial stream and hosted runs of steelhead trout entering from the Bay, but these salmonids are now blocked by numerous flood control structures, including a tidal gate at the creek's mouth and a long concretized rectangular channel culminating in an impassable drop structure at El Camino Real. The co-founders of Adobe Systems both lived on Adobe Creek.
Santa Clara County, officially the County of Santa Clara, is the sixth-most populous county in the U.S. state of California, with a population of 1,936,259, as of the 2020 census. Santa Clara County and neighboring San Benito County together form the U.S. Census Bureau's San Jose–Sunnyvale–Santa Clara metropolitan statistical area, which is part of the larger San Jose–San Francisco–Oakland combined statistical area. Santa Clara is the most populous county in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Northern California. The county seat and largest city is San Jose; with about 1,000,000 residents, it is the 10th-most populous city in the United States, California's third-most populous city and the most populous city in the San Francisco Bay Area. The second- and third-largest cities are Sunnyvale and Santa Clara.
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