Los Gatos

assistance.

INTRODUCTION

It can be argued that in terms of its site, its history, the colorful and talented people who have lived there, and the loyal feelings it has inspired for nearly 150 years, the Town of Los Gatos is among the most comprehensive, favored, and picturesque towns of its size in California. As the historic photographs and text in this elegant book attest, Los Gatos is no ordinary town. It is, rather, an almost complete statement about the possibilities of life in California.

Located at the base of the Santa Cruz Mountains, Los Gatos is from one point of view the southern edge of the San Francisco Bay Area. From another perspective, it is the gateway to Santa Cruz County. It is both of these things—and something more. It is a town enlivened by just about every topographical feature in California, with the exception of the desert.

First of all, Los Gatos is exquisitely situated on foothills, with views in many directions of the plain below and the even more ambitious mountains beyond. Few Italian hill towns can claim a more charming location. At Los Gatos, the urbanism of the San Francisco Bay Area, cresting in the great city of San Jose, the third largest city in the state, yields to the less settled foothills and, beyond these, to the groves of ancient redwoods of the Santa Cruz region. Thus at Los Gatos urbanism meets wilderness, mountain meets plain, foothills extend in every direction; and in the air, at various times and seasons, there is also the suggestion of the sea in the healing fogs coming over from the coast. If all this were not enough, Los Gatos even has its own creek, where in Native American times, Spanish and Mexican times, and through mid-20th century American times, the water flowed freely, rich in speckled trout for the taking.

In terms of the extended pageant of California history, Los Gatos has participated in each and every phase of California’s development without losing the intimacy, the identity, of a foothill town. In terms of its post-Native American designation, Los Gatos begins as a Mexican land grant, the Rancho Rinconada de Los Gatos. During the Native American, Spanish, Mexican, and early American years, grizzly bears, mountain lions, and bobcats roamed the foothills—mountain lions especially, for which the town was named. During the 1850s, Los Gatos emerged as a way station between Santa Cruz and San Jose, served by picturesque Concord coaches. Alma, Lexington, and Wright’s Station, all three little towns now gone, functioned along with Los Gatos as the harvesting and distribution centers for much of the lumber that went into the building of San Francisco and the New Almaden Quicksilver Mines.

During the first American decades, Los Gatos developed as an agricultural and transportation center, a shipping and market town, connected by rail to Santa Cruz and the Bay Area, on which the abundant harvests of the region—the great prune crops especially, but also apricots and other fruits—could reach their markets. In spring, the entire region from Los Gatos to Mount Hamilton was awash in white blossoms, truly earning the designation of the Santa Clara Valley as The Valley of Heart’s Delight. One Los Gatos orchardist, almond-grower John Bean, invented an innovative spray pump for insecticides. In time, the company formed by Bean and his son-in-law David C. Crummey, the Bean Spray Pump Company, developed into the Food Machinery Company, more commonly known as FMC, thereby including Los Gatos in the early annals of corporate America.

Civic life, social and communal, came early to Los Gatos—musterings of the Grand Army of the Republic, gatherings of the Modern Workmen of the World, rallies by the Los Gatos Women’s Christian Temperance Union—because the people of Los Gatos knew themselves as a community. The California-born philosopher Josiah Royce described such local patriotism as the golden age of High Provincialism in the state—the time, that is, starting in the 1870s, when Californians began to concentrate upon the development and enhancement of local civic ties. Los Gatos supported service clubs and cultural organizations even as a village. The Los Gatos Pageants, great outdoor spectacles that ran most years from 1919 through 1947, and engaged up to 500 members of the town in each production, illustrated the importance of building the cultural and esthetic side of the community.

Wisely, the Jesuit Order selected Los Gatos as the site of its Sacred Heart Novitiate, erecting its buildings just above the town. For more than 80 years, young men began their preparation for the Jesuit priesthood in these great stone buildings on sunny slopes. The Jesuits carefully cultivated their vineyards, and by the early 1900s the Novitiate Winery was the largest bonded ecclesiastical winery of its kind in the nation, serving the altars of Roman Catholic America, and giving—incidentally—young novices a chance to test their vocation during long sojourns in the field during the harvest season. The Sacred Heart Novitiate functions, in effect, like the Franciscan missions function for other California communities: as a way of suggesting California as the Mediterranean shores of Europe and recalling the significantly ecclesiastical origins of the Golden State.

As so many photographs in this book document, the aestheticism of Los Gatos and its surroundings has over the years made it a favored region of residence for artistic and literary people. In the 1890s essayist and poet Ambrose Bierce, who suffered from asthma, favored Los Gatos for its salubrious climate. In 1919 poet Sara Bard Field and her consort Colonel Charles Erskine Scott Wood settled in the nearby hills, commissioning from sculptor Robert Trent Paine the two great cats at the entrance to their estate, which to this day serve as the primary urban icons of the region.

Field and Wood were congenial people. They loved to entertain. And so did James Duval Phelan, the former mayor of San Francisco, living close by in a lavish estate called Montalvo. Down through the decades a journey to either Los Gatos or Montalvo became part of the protocol for visiting celebrities, especially if they were of a literary bent. Ironically, both John Steinbeck, who wrote The Grapes of Wrath nearby, and novelist Ruth Comfort Mitchell, who wrote Of Human Kindness to counteract Steinbeck’s depiction of California as a hard-hearted place, were part of the Los Gatos scene, especially Ruth Comfort Mitchell, who made her permanent home here, as did the talented Menuhin family. Violin phenomenon Yehudi Menuhin grew up in Los Gatos and as an adult returned whenever possible to his beloved estate east of Lexington. Actress Olivia de Havilland graduated from Los Gatos High School in 1934. Five years later, she had a starring role in Gone With the Wind. Even the rogues of Los Gatos seemed to have a certain panache, if one is to judge from Los Gatos native Harold Homer Chase, alleged to have fixed the World Series in 1919.

So then—from Native American times to the present, from the days of Don Jose Hernandez and Don Sebastian Peralta to such current residents as Steve Wozniak, Peggy Fleming, and Thomas Kinkade—the region and, later, the town of Los Gatos have continued to cast a spell. It does so because of the beauty of the area, most obviously, and its civility, but also because down through the decades men and women have found in Los Gatos that blend of nature and civilization, the pastoral and the civic, that has always remained a continuing goal of Californians. Perceived as nature, Los Gatos is a favored place. Perceived as history, Los Gatos can tell itself a virtually complete California story. Perceived as a community, a place in time, Los Gatos remains an ongoing quest. This book represents a significant step on that journey.

—Kevin Starr, State Librarian Emeritus

One

OUT WEST

We are the pioneers of the world; the advance-guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path in the New World that is ours.

—Herman Melville

IN THE CORNER OF THE CATS. Unearthly screams of mountain lions by moonlight, horses galloping and neighing, whips cracking, oxen pulling wood in groaning wagons, grunts, curses, oaths, greetings, farewells, coaches rumbling and creaking, chuff of steam engines, lonesome whistles, clatter of rails, rush of water over stone—these were the sounds of Cats’ Canyon, pictured here in the 1890s. A South Pacific Coast Railroad narrow-gauge train is heading south out of Los Gatos, on its way to Santa Cruz and the Pacific Ocean, 22 miles away. The old unpaved road to Santa Cruz is on the left, and Los Gatos Creek is on the right. (Courtesy of William A. Wulf.)

FELIS CONCOLOR. The imposing mountain range between Los Gatos and Santa Cruz has always been prime mountain lion country. Solitary and strongly territorial mountain lions require isolated and game-rich wilderness. Six people have been killed by mountain lions in California since 1890. However sightings of the big cats are fairly common and have increased in recent years as humans crowd into the state’s wildlands.

URSUS ARCTOS HORRIBLITS. Grizzly bears were common in the Santa Cruz Mountains until the middle of the 19th century, but disappeared before 1900. Bears were hunted both for sport and to eliminate the danger they posed. A grizzly can grow to massive dimensions, weighing between 300 and 850 pounds and standing 7 to 9 feet tall on powerful rear legs, as shown in this 1958 illustration by Lee Ames, from the book Hoofs, Claws and Antlers: The Story of American Big Game Animals.

FELIS RUFUS. This popular Los Gatos postcard of a captive bobcat was published c. 1900. Deer, coyote, foxes, and many types of smaller game also populated the landscape. They shared local terrain with the Ohlone Indians, the Spanish explorers who first arrived in 1769, the Franciscan missionary padres who arrived in 1777, and the Californios, Spanish-speaking people who settled on