History of Santa Clara County, California
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.The Russians had settled Alaska and were exploring the West Coast for trading posts within striking distance of the rich Spanish mines.Captain Thomas Fallon, leading 19 men, entered San Jose on July 14, 1846, and raised the United States flag over the town hall.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.Los Gatos was formed from land originally owned by the British vice-consul to Mexican California, James Alexander Forbes.Paul Shoup, a Southern Pacific executive, spotted a good site for a township and organized the Altos Land Company.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.[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.Santa Clara County, with its farms, orchards and ranches remained largely rural and agricultural until after World War II.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.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.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.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.Returning World War II veterans, getting married and settling down produced a baby boom unprecedented in American history.Certainly America's defense spending during the Cold War Era, when research and development strove to keep abreast of the Soviet Union, helped.The creation of lasers, nuclear magnetic resonance, random access computer storage, disk drives, integrated circuits, personal computers, open-heart surgery, inkjet printers, gene-splicing and other advances in such a short span of time has placed Santa Clara County firmly in history as a unique location whose creative energies have changed the world.