California Apricots

The Lost Orchards of Silicon Valley

Robin Chapman

• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781609497958
• eBook ISBN: 9781614239222
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Picked warm from a tree, a California apricot opens into halves as easily as if it came with a dotted line down its center. The seed infuses the core with a hint of almond; the fruit carries the scent of citrus and jasmine; and it tastes, some say, like manna from heaven. In these pages, Robin Chapman recalls the season when the Santa Clara Valley was the largest apricot producer in the world and recounts the stories of Silicon Valley's now lost orchards. From the Spaniards in the eighteenth century who first planted apricots in the Mission Santa Clara gardens to the post-World War II families who built their homes among subdivided orchards, relive the long summer days ripe with bumper crops of this much-anticipated delicacy.

CHAPTER 1

Padres and Apricot Trees

My sister and I still remember the sounds of the orchards, especially in the early morning. The ’cots plunking in the buckets. The rustling of the leaves. The men talking quietly in Spanish. These are the sounds of my childhood.

—Louise Pavlina Hering

Luke Pavlina came to America in 1913 when he was seventeen. The land of his birth, a piece of the Balkans that was sometimes part of Italy and later part of Yugoslavia, was then a piece of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was also on the cusp of being torn apart by the Great War.

Pavlina left it all behind to come to California’s peaceful Santa Clara Valley. The sun-kissed land had a climate that was like that of his homeland. Here, he did the work he knew: he worked in the orchards.

By 1920, he had saved enough to buy his first five acres of orchard land on El Camino Real, near Mary Avenue, in Sunnyvale. In the next two decades, his operation would grow to thirty-four acres where three generations of Pavlinas would cultivate apricot trees.

The fact that Pavlina’s farm fronted on El Camino Real ties his story to early California history. It was along El Camino Real—what became this Royal Highway, in any case—that the Spanish soldiers and padres marched into California to build their settlements.

This tiny invasion by a handful of Spaniards brought unimagined changes to California, yet the story of the Santa Clara Valley’s apricot orchards cannot be separated from it. Agriculture, irrigation and fruit from distant lands were among the things these European settlers brought with them.

Vintage postcards from the early twentieth century could still find corners of California that looked as they did when the Europeans arrived. This one says on the back: “In spring, the California county-side presents vistas in an unbelievable profusion of floral beauty.” Author’s collection.

Until the Spanish came, the California landscape had been especially isolated from exploration by its geography. With unwelcoming deserts to its south, formidable Sierras to its east and the not-very-pacific Pacific Ocean to its west, it was, as Shakespeare wrote about England, “ …a fortress built by Nature for herself.”

Early mapmakers thought it could be an island, and it might as well have been, considering its isolation. It took a long, long time for European explorers to surmount the obstacles that served as guardians of its natural wealth and beauty.

In the sixteenth century, at least two Europeans sailed the California coast and made landfall. Though they did not, alas, bring apricot trees with them, they are important to this story because their explorations led to the many more that followed. There were probably even more adventurers than the ones we know about who sailed the California coast. The oral tradition of the California Indians includes tales like this one, recounted by Edna Kimbro and Julia Costello in their book about early California: “In the old days, before the white people came…there was a boat sailing on the ocean from the south. Because [the people] had never seen a boat, they said, ‘Our world must be coming to an end. Couldn’t we do something? This big bird floating on the ocean is from somewhere, probably from up high. Let us plan a feast. Let us have a dance.’ They followed its course with their eyes to see what it would do.”

Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo sailed up from Baja California in June 1542, at the behest of the Viceroy of Mexico—then called New Spain. He is the first European—whom we know of—to walk on California’s shores. On September 28, 1542, he and his fleet entered San Diego harbor, disembarked to restock and staked a claim there for Spain.

Heading farther north, Cabrillo was the first European to see an early form of California land management. Arriving near what is now San Pedro Bay, he saw the coastline engulfed in the thick smoke of a chaparral fire. California’s coastal Indians often set these fires to clear the underbrush surrounding the oaks, making it easier for them to harvest the acorns, a staple of their diet. Cabrillo dubbed San Pedro Baya de los Fumos, or Smokey Bay.

For the next three months he sailed, missing the narrow entrance to San Francisco Bay but stopping in Monterey Bay, which he called Bahia de los Piños, literally Bay of the Pines. Point Piños, at the south end of Monterey Bay, is a remnant today of that early name.

The months of late summer and early fall are often the best time of year in Northern California. Cabrillo clearly thought so, writing “delicioso” in the ship’s log.

But the winter weather was less delicious, and the storms of November 1542 made his return journey difficult. In December, Cabrillo and his ships stopped at one of the Channel Islands. There, near Christmas Eve, Cabrillo slipped on some rocks—some sources say he fell in a skirmish with the Indians—and the captain was injured. Sources disagree on whether he injured an arm or a leg. But the broken bone became infected, and Cabrillo died on January 3, 1543. He was buried—according to legend—on San Miguel Island.

In 1579, thirty years after Cabrillo, Francis Drake sailed around the world and stopped somewhere in Northern California. Queen Elizabeth wanted to keep his journey a secret since she did not want to aggravate the Spanish, her international rivals. Drake received a knighthood for his trouble and came home with a hoard of gold and other treasure pirated from Spanish ships, so his adventure can’t have been much of a secret. Still, the records of his expedition were first suppressed and then were lost in a fire.

A vintage postcard made in Germany in the early twentieth century shows the Point Piños Lighthouse, Monterey, California. The name of the point comes directly from the explorer Cabrillo, who called the nearby bay Bahia de los Pinos, or Inlet of the Pines. Author’s collection.

Gaspar de Portolà brought a very small group with him when he entered California. Since the camera was still a century away, we have only sketches like this one on a vintage postcard to mark his journey. It takes a few liberties. By this point in the trip, the soldiers’ clothes were in tatters and the Native American men wore even less than those pictured here. Author’s collection.

Historians do know, from the testimony of his crew, that he stopped to resupply at a bay in Northern California. On that stop, he held a peaceful meeting with a group of native people who watched in amazement as he erected a cross and conducted the first Protestant service in California. By tradition, the place he disembarked is an inlet just north of San Francisco, now called Drake’s Bay.

But neither of these expeditions brought either settlers or exotic fruit trees. For the next two centuries, while the eastern coast of North America was growing into thirteen productive colonies of England, California remained unexplored by Europeans, in the shade of its redwoods and behind the shroud of its coastal fog.

By the 1760s, the Russians had begun sailing from Alaska into Northern California to extend their search for furs. The King of Spain decided his nation needed to get a better foothold on the California coast.

In 1767, Gaspar de Portolà was ordered by the viceroy of New Spain to take a party of explorers, missionaries and cattle into Alta California. Franciscan father Junípero Serra joined the expedition with the goal of establishing at least two mission settlements—one in San Diego and one in Monterey, where a bay had been spotted by both Cabrillo and the explorer Sebastián Vizcaíno. During this first journey, Portolà and his men missed Monterey but managed to gaze on San Francisco Bay from the Bay Area’s surrounding hills.

For the soldiers and the politicians, the missions were a way to create settlements that would extend political power. For the church, the missions were designed to create parishioners. The Franciscans hoped to convert indigenous people and save their souls.

Based on their work in Baja California, the padres expected they could raise the food they needed to survive. If the land was good, they might also be able to grow enough to feed the mission and any converts they might make, as well as teach the skills of ranching, farming and irrigation. If the land was better—as it turned out to be in the Santa Clara Valley—the missions could send home the surplus as tribute to the Spanish king.

What a strange journey it was, this first trek by Europeans along the California coast. The soldiers and padres saw a thriving native culture around them, but one that was very different from their own.

They met Indians who had never seen European clothing—never set eyes on a gun—never heard the whinny of a horse. Villagers greeted them and sent out word about the fabulous men. Crowds gathered wherever the Spanish camped, watching the interlopers. The Indians played music, and, as was their custom, they danced and danced.

Historians Rose Beebe and Robert Senkewicz have pulled together and translated many of the original documents from this period in Lands of Promise and Despair. From them we learn the padres began immediately trying to convert the native Californians. At the same time, the Spanish found their natural curiosity invasive and annoying, forgetting, perhaps that they themselves were the strangers.

As Father Juan Crespí wrote, “These dances lasted all afternoon and it was very difficult for us to get rid of these people. They were sent away and with gestures were told emphatically not to come during the night and disturb us. However, it was all in vain. As soon as night fell they returned playing some pipes. The noise grated on our ears.”

The Spanish were amazed by California. The land was covered with wildflowers, grassland and oak trees. There were foxes practically underfoot, and they could see grizzly bears feeding in the foothills. Most surprising of all were these curious indigenous people.

Among them were hundreds of native groups. Some traded with one another, and some were mortal enemies. Some spoke similar languages to one another, and some could not understand the language of nearby villages.

From the Ipai and Kiliwa in the southern part of California, to the Miwok, Ohlone and Yokuts in Northern California, there was no central organization among these thousands of people designed to deal with a cultural assault on their entire way of life.

How could there have been? Nothing like this visit from the Spanish had ever happened before. No one, among either the native Californians or the Spanish, could see into the future.

What the future brought was great sorrow for the indigenous people. In the decades during which the Spanish ruled California, its Indians saw much of their world swept away.

Among the people they met were some kind and loving padres who practiced the Christianity they preached and some who did not. They met ethical, humane soldiers like Juan Bautista de Anza and found other soldiers to be wicked and cruel. What no one foresaw was the impact of European diseases on people without immunity to them. Death from disease was the greatest unintended consequence of Spanish settlement in California.

Botanist Mary Elizabeth Parsons wrote in 1902, “California, with her wonderfully varied climate and topography, has a flora correspondingly rich and varied, probably not surpassed by any region of like area in the Northern Hemisphere.” Author’s collection.

Historians, such as Edna Kimbro and Julia Costello, still debate why so few invaders could have caused so much change, a question that occurred to a German traveler they quote who visited one California mission in 1806: “Two or three monks, and four or five soldiers, keep in order a community of a thousand or fifteen hundred [natives], making them lead a wholly different course of life from that to which they had been accustomed.”

All this was in the future as Portolà and a handful of Spanish-speaking travelers marched into California.

To these men of the eighteenth century with firm views on king, country and church, the most curious thing about the native men they met was the way they dressed, or actually, the way they didn’t dress. Father Serra’s first impressions of this surprising aspect of the exploration can be found in a contemporary letter translated by C. De Murville in The Man Who Founded California: “I saw something I could not believe when I had read of it, or had been told about it…They were entirely naked, as Adam in the Garden…We spoke a long time with them, and not for one moment, while they saw us clothed, could you notice the least sign of shame in them for their own lack of dress.”

It was one of the earliest indications Europeans came across of the mildness of the California climate.

Along with their plans to settle the land and convert the inhabitants, the expedition brought something else, as agricultural expert Edward J. Wickson pointed out more than a century later: “Credit is given to the secular head of the expedition, Don Joseph de Galvez, representing the King of Spain, for ordering the carrying of seeds of fruits, grains, vegetables, and flowers into the new territory, and from the planting at San Diego the same varieties that were taken to the twenty missions afterwards established.”

Serra, who traveled with Portolà, was from the island of Majorca, a place with a coastline and climate that look a lot like California. Unlike California, Majorca had been repeatedly conquered over the centuries—by Romans, Vandals, Moors, Muslim caliphates and by the French kingdom of Aragon. By the time Serra was born in Majorca in 1713, it was ruled by Spain.

The Arabs had brought agriculture and irrigation to the island, and now Serra brought these with him to California. It may not be a coincidence that one of Majorca’s orchard crops then, as now, was the apricot.

Serra’s colleague and friend on the journey, Juan Crespí, was also from Majorca and was instrumental in helping Serra establish the first missions and the first mission gardens. With Portolà, he walked into the Santa Clara Valley and was one of the first explorers to tell us what it looked like.

Recounted by Lorie Garcia, George Giacomini and Geoffrey Goodfellow in their recent history of Santa Clara, Crespí described the valley as “a plain some six leagues long, grown with good oaks and live oaks, and with much other timber in the neighborhood. This plain has two good arroyos with a good flow of water, and at the southern end of the estuary there is a good river, with plenty of water…This entire port is surrounded by many and large villages of barbarous heathens who are very affable, mild, and docile, and very generous.”

Walking the path that became El Camino Real, the Portolà expedition—after several tries—found a spot on Monterey Bay for Northern California’s first Spanish fort, or presidio. Hundreds ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction. A House in the Orchard
• 1. Padres and Apricot Trees
• 2. Travels with the Apricot
• 3. Apricots and the Amazing Century
• 4. Apricot Acreage
• 5. Lives in the Apricot Orchards
• 6. Apricot Summers
• 7. The Influential Apricot
• 8. Cooking with ’Cots
• Afterword. The Second Orchard
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography
• About the Author