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Title
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Valley of the Hearts Delight
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Description
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Viewing the Californios’ cattle-based hide and tallow trade as wasteful, Anglo Americans concentrated initially on dry wheat farming in the 1850s and the 1860s. Over the next hundred years, until the 1960s, Anglo growers shifted to more profitable irrigated specialty orchard crops–cherries, pears, plums, and peaches. By 1930 growers devoted 65% of Santa Clara County land to fruit trees, expanding from only ten acres in 1890. According to historian Jacklyn Greenberg, prune trees dominated fruit production in Santa Clara County, which became the nation’s largest exporter of prunes between 1920 and 1940. Most of the specialty orchard and row (tomato and pea) crop farms were smaller than the large-scale, agribusiness farms of Salinas and the San Joaquín Valley. By 1915, local boosters dubbed Santa Clara “The Valley of the Heart’s Delight.”
Following early experimentation, the canning industry, established in 1872, accelerated the distribution of fruit crops to markets made accessible by railroads. The value of these crops grew rapidly with the construction in 1864 of the first commercial rail line to Santa Clara County, the San Francisco-San Jose Railway, which was sold to Southern Pacific in 1887. In the early 20th century (1910s to 1960s), Santa Clara County became the nation’s capital for fruit or specialty crop production and processing (canning).
With the shift to specialty irrigated crops, a large labor force was necessary for harvesting and drying. During the dry-farm years of wheat production in the 1850s-1860s, Anglo-American men carrying their belongings on their back migrated throughout California in search of harvest work. With the shift to specialty orchard crops in Santa Clara County in the 1870s, an even larger labor force was needed for planting, irrigating, weeding, and harvesting. Many early farmworkers in specialty crops were Mexican Californio men and families who had lost their land and become wage laborers. Workers also included Chinese immigrant men and ethnically white immigrant families, such as Portuguese, Spanish, and Italians. By the 1890s Japanese men entered the specialty crop labor force and were joined in the 1910s by Japanese women and families. The availability of low-cost migrant farm labor helped expand fruit ranching in Santa Clara County.
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Identifier
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B4SV Exhibit Topic Two: Slide 001
