History

The Enoch J. Parrish House in Cupertino, built in 1895

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Le Petit Trianon and its columned porch on the De Anza campus

A short history of Cupertino

Cupertino began as a creek with a saint’s name and a crossroads called West Side. For a century it was a district of vineyards and then of prune, apricot and cherry orchards on the western edge of the Santa Clara Valley. It became a city in 1955, and within a generation it was one of the centres of Silicon Valley. This page tells that story in short, with a link to the source for every claim. For the full texts of the old books, see the reading list.

The first people

Before the Spanish came, the Tamyen (or Thamien), a division of the Ohlone, lived throughout the valley [2]. Spanish colonisation followed the founding of Mission Santa Clara de Thamien in 1777 [2]. When Anza’s expedition crossed the plain below the hills in March 1776, Font counted more than a hundred people who came out to meet the column, shouting and signalling the strangers not to go on [4].

Anza’s camp and the name, 1776

In 1776 Juan Bautista de Anza led an expedition from Sonora to found a presidio on San Francisco Bay [2]. On March 25 he crossed a broad plain of oaks and live oaks, turned west along the foot of the hills and halted at the arroyo of San Joseph Cupertino, a place he thought useful only for travellers; from camp he could see the estuary of the bay [3]. The expedition’s diarist and map-maker, Fray Pedro Font, called the plain the Llano de los Robles, the Plain of the Oaks, and found the camp well supplied with water and firewood but without level land for a settlement [4]. The city credits Font with naming the stream, which is now Stevens Creek [2]; it honoured Saint Joseph of Cupertino [1]. Bolton, who translated the diaries, placed the camp a little southwest of today’s town, on Calabasas Creek north of Saratoga, and noted that Cupertino kept the name [3]. The state marked Arroyo de San José Cupertino as California Historical Landmark No. 800 in 1964 [7].

Ranchos and the first settlers, 1839-1862

Under Mexico, Rancho Quito, granted in 1841, took in parts of today’s Saratoga, Campbell and Cupertino [25]. Elisha Stephens, captain of the Stephens-Townsend-Murphy Party, the first wagon train to cross the Sierra Nevada in 1844, settled on the creek in 1848 [8]. He planted about four acres of Mission grapes in the creek bottom and blackberries, which gave his ranch its name, Blackberry Farm [5]. By the 1860s the stream was known as Cupertino Creek, before it was renamed for Stephens with the spelling Stevens [7]. Local storytellers remember him as a grump who served rattlesnake to his guests; in 1862 he left for Kern County, where he died in 1887 [9] [8].

The Cupertino District and its vines, 1870-1900

The land around the creek was thin and covered with chaparral, and grain farmers struggled on it [5]. In 1870 S. R. Williams cleared and planted a hundred acres of vines, part of them on Stephens’ old claim, and Norman Porter planted a vineyard in 1871 [5]. When the vines proved themselves, a planting boom followed from 1880 to 1885, by Portal, Thompson, Hall, Doyle, Montgomery, Bubb and others [5]. John T. Doyle, a San Francisco lawyer and historian, named his Cupertino Wine Co. after the creek in the 1880s [2]. On Montebello Ridge, Vincenzo and Secondo Picchetti settled in 1877 and began making their own wine in 1896 [10]. Around 1895 phylloxera, a root louse, destroyed about three quarters of the vineyards in five years, and many growers turned to French prunes, peaches, apricots, cherries, plums, walnuts and almonds [2].

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West Side becomes Cupertino, 1880-1920

A settlement called West Side grew up at the Crossroads of the Saratoga-Sunnyvale road (now De Anza Boulevard) and Stevens Creek Road [2]. Alexander Montgomery built a store on the corner of his ranch there; it was run by the Home Union for ten years and later incorporated as the Cupertino Store [6]. In 1904, when the post office needed a new name, the name of Doyle’s winery was given to the Crossroads, the post office and the Home Union Store, which became The Cupertino Store [2]. William Baer, a blacksmith from Philadelphia, ran a shop at the Crossroads that served wagons and then the first motor cars [22]. In 1892 Charles and Ellen Baldwin built Le Petit Trianon at the centre of their Beaulieu wine estate, whose wines sold in New York, London and Central America [12]. In 1922 Sawyer’s county history described Cupertino as a town of about 500 people with no fixed boundaries, on the electric railway, surrounded by prune and apricot ranches [6].

The orchard years

Electric railways and then motor cars brought visitors to see the spring blossom of the Valley of Heart’s Delight, and the electric railway led to Monta Vista, the first housing tract in the Cupertino area [2]. The Picchetti family kept their ranch through Prohibition by growing prunes, apricots and pears and boarding horses [11]. The Leonard family grew prunes and apricots and sold them to Gerber [18]. On the Leonard ranch stood a redwood barn built in 1916 by John Leonard, who had married into the Glendenning family [20].

A city, 1955

After the Second World War the valley’s population boomed, and in 1954 rancher Norman Nathanson, the Cupertino-Monta Vista Improvement Association and the Fact-finding Committee began a drive for incorporation [2]. Voters approved it on September 27, 1955, by 225 votes to 183, and Cupertino became Santa Clara County’s 13th city on October 10, 1955 [1]. Monta Vista decided at the last moment not to join and was annexed piece by piece until 2004 [14]. Rancho Rinconada, a tract of low-cost houses designed by Cliff May and built by Stern & Price in the 1950s, stayed in the county until its residents voted to join the city in 1999 [15].

Vallco, the college and the computer, 1960-1990

In the early 1960s seventeen landowners pooled their land as VALLCO Business and Industrial Park, named for Varian Associates and the Leonard, Lester, Craft and Orlando families [2]. In 1964 Burrel Leonard sold 100 acres of his ranch to Varian [18]. De Anza College opened in 1967 on the 112-acre site of the Baldwins’ winery, and their mansion became the California History Center [2]. Le Petit Trianon was listed on the National Register in 1972, moved twice on the campus and restored in 1982 [13]. Apple arrived in Cupertino in 1977 [2]; its co-founders, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, had graduated from Homestead High School on the city’s northern edge [26]. Vallco Fashion Park opened on September 1, 1976 [17]. In January 1984 Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh at De Anza’s Flint Center [19]. The cherry trees of Memorial Park arrived from sister city Toyokawa, Japan, in 1983 [16].

Cupertino today

Apple built its Infinite Loop campus in 1993 and made it the company’s headquarters after 1997 [21]. In 2011 Steve Jobs presented the design of a new circular campus to the City Council in his last public appearance, and Apple Park opened in 2017, its courtyard planted with apricot, olive and apple orchards; the Leonards’ barn was taken apart and rebuilt on the site [20]. Most of the Vallco mall was demolished from 2019 [17], and Main Street Cupertino, an 18-acre mixed-use project, was planned as the city’s first modern attempt at a downtown [29]. The Flint Center held its last event in 2019 [19]. The Baer blacksmith shop, rebuilt as a replica by William Baer’s son Charlie, stands at McClellan Ranch Preserve, where a smith fires the forge on the last Saturday of every month [22] [23]. Blackberry Farm, owned by the Nelson family in the orchard years, when its pools hosted company parties of thousands, was bought by the city in 1991 [28]. The city’s sister cities are Copertino in Italy, first named in 1963, Toyokawa, Hsinchu and Bhubaneswar [27] [1]. Above the valley, Picchetti Ranch, Fremont Older and the other foothill preserves keep the hayfields, vineyards and fruit trees of the old West Side [11] [24].