San Jose may be called the “Capital of Silicon Valley,” but it’s rich with history. The city became the first modern settlement in California when it was founded in 1777 as “El Pueblo de San Jose de Guadalupe.” Decades later, the discovery of gold near Coloma, California in 1848 prompted 300,000 thrill-seekers from all over the United States to move to California hoping to strike it rich. This population boom prompted California to become a state, with San Jose serving as the state’s first state capital from 1849 to 1851.
The late 1800s is when History Park starts to tell the story of San Jose. “For us, the sweet spot is from 1880 to 1920. The ‘Valley of the Heart’s Delight’ is what our park is all about,” said Steve Bright, the property’s director of events, referring to the sprawling orchards that once occupied San Jose. “Settlers planted prunes, peaches and apricots, and we canned those for the next hundred years. Then, in the 1970s, the urban sprawl kicked in, the orchards were taken out, and the suburbs grew,” Bright said.
Major parts of the original route connecting 21 Spanish missions spanning from modern-day San Francisco to San Diego eventually became U.S. Highway 101. “When that freeway was built, it displaced several historic buildings, and those buildings found homes here. We picked them up, rolled them down El Camino, and placed them here at History Park.”
History Park houses eight original buildings from the area, along with replicas, which together create a town-like assemblage of 32 homes, businesses and landmarks. “We are a reproduction of what downtown San Jose looked like in the early to mid-1900s at half-scale,” said Bright. “If you visit Caesar Chavez Park downtown, it looks almost exactly the same as our park.”
Original buildings on display at History Park include the Chiechi House, the Coyote Post Office, the Santa Anna One-Room Schoolhouse, the Umbarger House, and the Gordon House. “Our Trolley Barn is a reproduction, but its purpose is to restore trolleys,” Bright said. “The trolley barn has three original trolleys on display. There are also two original locomotives on property.”
History Park is also home to 19 partner non-profit organizations which occupy and manage day-to-day operations within the historic buildings and replicas on property. Those include the Rotary Club of San Jose, the Museum of the Boat People and Republic of Vietnam, the Chinese American Historical Museum, the Portugese Historical Museum, the African American Heritage House, the La Raza Historical Society of San Jose, Poetry Center San Jose, and the California Trolley and Railroad Corporation.
“Our goal here is diversity, so a lot of our partner nonprofits are cultural groups or art groups,” said Bright. “They activate their programs inside the park and tell their stories inside of their spaces. We tell their story as part of ours.”
History Park will soon host some Connect Live attendees on-property who will undertake a volunteer planting project at the property’s student teaching garden as well as add Street View photography to Google Maps.
Plan to visit History Park? Have a place like this in your town? Tell us about it.
