Driving along Cochrane Road near Anderson Reservoir the other
day, I saw several acres of a fruit orchard had been cleared
recently and the trees were placed in large piles waiting to be
removed.
Driving along Cochrane Road near Anderson Reservoir the other day, I saw several acres of a fruit orchard had been cleared recently and the trees were placed in large piles waiting to be removed.
The sight of the fallen orchard got me to thinking about our area’s orchard history. With the development of massive housing tracts and industrial and shopping complexes, the orchard heritage we have inherited is slowly eroding away.
Like many things in California, it all started with the Gold Rush. In the 1840s, wheat was the region’s principle crop. Year after year, the rich soil produced bountiful grain crops that were ground at local flour mills powered by the abundance of creeks here. But in the 1850s, gold miners were paying exorbitant amounts for fresh plums, apricots, pears, apples and cherries.
Two French brothers, Louis and Pierre Pellier, recognized the economic potential of growing fruit in the valley. In 1856, Pierre traveled back to France and returned with fine specimens of cherry, pear and plum trees. But the true agricultural treasure he brought the region’s farmers was cuttings of the petit prune d’Agen. These cuttings would cultivate the prune industry that would come to dominate the Valley.
Technological innovations also played a role in turning Santa Clara County into what its residents called “The Valley of Heart’s Delight.”
The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 opened brand-new markets for the region’s fruit, especially as the populated East Coast grew with European immigrants.
And innovations in mass-produced canning by local inventors provide ways to enjoy the valley’s fruit throughout the year. A new industry of large, heavily-mechanized canning factories was born in the county.
Some innovative ideas were not as, uh, fruitful. An unverifiable but charming local legend holds that one prune farmer named Martin B. Seely lamented the rising cost of hiring farm hands to pick the d’Agen plums in his orchard. This was a time before practical mechanized picking machines.
Seely had read about how monkeys in tropical regions had been trained to harvest coconuts and other fruit, and he reasoned that primates might be just as useful for picking the plums that he dried into prunes. From Panama, he imported 500 monkeys. He split them into groups of 50, placing a human foreman in charge of each group. The monkeys scampered into the trees and did indeed nimbly pick the juicy purple fruit. But it turns out that they were hungry, and they ate the entirety of Seely’s harvest as they went through his orchard.
Farming has always been a high-risk enterprise. In addition to the whims of the weather, fruit farmers also have to deal with the variable market forces which can jeopardize their livelihood.
The farmers of the Santa Clara Valley quickly realized the need to band together to combat the unpredictability of economic factors. In 1872, the San Jose-San Francisco Railroad raised its freight rates dramatically, cutting substantially into the local farmers’ profits. So they formed the San Jose Farmers Club and Protection Association and hired a steamer to transport their produce from Alviso to the auctions in San Francisco. The price of shipping a small container of fruit dropped from $1 to 60 cents, a major savings for the farmer.
In 1874, the Farmers Union Corporation was founded by valley growers to supply equipment and seeds at discounted bulk rates. During the next several decades, valley farmers united in other associations to give them more power in negotiating with railroads for freight prices as well as obtaining better rates for packing and storage costs.
In 1931, during the bleak years of the Great Depression, Santa Clara County’s orchardists formed another cooperative venture to buy equipment cheaply. Called Orchard Supply Hardware, the first store was located on 10th Street in San Jose. In 1946, the successful cooperative moved to 720 W. San Carlos St. by the railroad tracks. This store is still open.
In 1980, the cooperative’s members sold the venture to W.R. Grace Company. Today, Orchard Supply Hardware has moved away from its agricultural origins. It is a nationally recognized chain with more than 75 stores — including one in Gilroy — serving customers with home repair and do-it-yourself products.
The Central Valley is now where most of the fruit and produce in California is grown. The aqueduct system built in the 1960s and 1970s by the state supplies much of the water for the agricultural industry in this region.
Land value has gone up so dramatically in Santa Clara County since the boom of Silicon Valley’s high-tech industries, that many old-time farm families find it just makes economic sense to sell their orchards to developers. You can’t survive on nostalgia, some people say.
It’s kind of sad. Some time in the near future, the last fruit tree will fall, another sub-division will go up, and the area’s orchard heritage started by hungry gold miners will be lost in the name of progress.
