Santa Clara Valley Historical Association

Two centuries ago, the Santa Clara Valley and the San Francisco Bay lay almost untouched by human endeavor. The thin population of Costa Indians, inhabitants for many thousand years, had walked softly on the land, leaving little but shell mounds as traces of their hunter-gatherer culture. The oak-studded valley floor, with willow thickets near the shore and dense chaparral edging the foothills and the timbered mountains, showed only the creations of nature.

European explorers came starting in 1769 -- Spanish soldiers and Franciscan padres. Slowly they built presidios (army bases) and a chain of missions. The missions became hubs for agriculture and for attempts to convert and domesticate the indigenous "heathens" to Christianity. Farming proved to be the more successful activity.

Late in 1777, California's first civil settlement was established in the heart of the Santa Clara Valley -- el Pueblo de San Jose de Guadalupe. Frequent flooding led to the town's relocation away from the river in 1797; even then the initial count of 66 settlers had not doubled. Early in the 1820s, Mexico broke away from Spain and began to rule in Alta California. The jurisdiction of the San Jose ayuntamiento or town council spread northward into San Mateo and Alameda counties. After control of the missions passed from church to civil authorities in the mid-1830s, some of Mission Santa Clara's grazing lands in the present Mountain View-Palo Alto area were granted to individual owners.

In the 1839-1844 period, San Jose wrested from San Francisco the honor of being la cabrera del partido, or capital of the district. But that was not to last, for San Francisco was ideally suited for water transportation in the prime of the sailing ship, and about 1845 its population began to swell. Just before the Gold Rush, the town founded in 1835 had grown to 200 shacks and adobes inhabited by about 800 whites.

In 1846, American Capt. John B. Montgomery sailed the sloop of war Portsmouth into the bay, landed with sailors and marines and raised the U.S. flag in the plaza. The 1849 Gold Rush gradually filled San Francisco harbor with deserted ships, their crews having rushed to the diggings. But it was not the miners who got rich -- those who fed, provisioned, and otherwise catered to them did.

Rapid growth helped win California statehood in 1850, and San Jose enjoyed a brief time as the first state capital. But valley and Peninsula land remained in farming and ranching, and thus stayed open, generally in large tracts. Logging stripped the mountains to the west to supply San Francisco's ravenous appetite for building materials.

In 1863, an upstate New York-born lawyer who had prospered as a merchant supplying miners was elected governor. Leland Stanford served for only two years, but long afterward was esteemed as the "Civil War governor" who had exerted his powers to keep the state in the Union and aid President Lincoln. He and three compatriots, Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, and Colis P. Huntington, had already organized the Central Pacific Railroad; later they completed the western part of the first transcontinental railroad, and Stanford himself drove the golden spike. They also bought out the San Francisco and San Jose Railroad, which had reached Mayfield (now Palo Alto's California Avenue district) in 1863 and San Jose early the next year.

In 1874, Stanford, who presided over the Central Pacific (later the Southern Pacific), moved from Sacramento to a Nob Hill mansion in San Francisco. A fancier of trotters and racehorses, he sought a country retreat. He found one near el Palo Alto, the landmark redwood where the first exploring Spaniards had camped in 1769. There the governor built up a horse farm that became America's most famous. Gradually he acquired more than 8,000 acres.

Stanford and his wife, Jane Lathrop Stanford, were touring Europe when their only son, Leland Jr., 15, contracted typhoid fever and died in Italy in 1884. The heartbroken parents soon decided that his memorial would be a university, with their Palo Alto estate part of its unprecedented $20 million endowment. Plans for the project dominated Stanford's attention, even after the California Legislature elected him a United States senator. In business he had met many eastern college graduates whose education had left them ill-prepared for the workaday world. One of the standards he set was that the university qualify its students for "personal success and direct usefulness in life." David Starr Jordan, chosen as the founding president, fully respected this wish as well as Stanford's insistence that the sciences be given their proper place, not denied it as on most other campuses of that era.

On October 1, 1891, Leland Stanford Junior University opened. Enrollment at the tuition-free institution almost doubled expectations -- 440, about one-quarter women. By the second semester it had swelled to 559, many more than were then enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley. The professed wish of the grieving Stanfords that "The children of California shall be our children" had begun to be fulfilled. And from its start, the university served not just the children of California but of the world.

Pioneer professors welcomed the practicality Senator Stanford preached and President Jordan championed. Particularly in the sciences and engineering, they set a tradition of intensive field work, as well as classroom lectures, laboratory experiments and book study. Both as consultants and as teachers, they made league with leaders of industry, business, and government in their fields so their students would understand what needed to be done in the "real world."

Herbert C. Hoover arrived in Palo Alto early for tutoring before he joined the pioneer Class of 1895; he can be called the university's first student. His rapid rise to the top ranks of mining engineers offered one example of Stanford's success in educating students for useful lives. About two decades later Hoover organized World War I food relief, then served as a Cabinet officer and President of the United States.

Palo Alto, a town laid out by Timothy Hopkins with the help of a loan cosigned by Leland Stanford, grew quickly, although the land had been left in hayfields until 1890. Its residents voted to incorporate in 1894. From the start, Stanford professors played key roles in the town's civic affairs. Engineering professors Charles D. (Daddy) Marx and Charles B. Wing were leaders in gaining city ownership of all major utilities -- a rarity, and the base for a strong infrastructure when high technology came to town in the 1950s.

Before the turn of the century, electrical engineering Professor Frederic A.C. Perrine teamed up with students to field-test a locally developed high-potential oil switch. It made possible construction of 40,000-volt lines across the state, harnessing water power in a locale far from coal sources. In 1905, Professor Harris J. (Paddy) Ryan, a transmission research pioneer at Cornell University, came west to head the Stanford electrical engineering faculty. He too promoted university-industry cooperation, as did another man who joined the faculty in 1904, William F. Durand, the leading authority on airplane propeller design.

Senator Stanford's death in June 1893 plunged the university into a money crisis. While lawsuits tied up his estate, Mrs. Stanford devoted intense effort, personal income, and even her jewels to seeing that the university survived. The estate won in court. Under the founding grant, Mrs. Stanford controlled the endowment until 1902, when she empowered the Board of Trustees. A new round of campus construction was almost completed when she died in 1905.

At that point, Stanford did not rank among the world's foremost universities. But its foundations were well laid. Its blending of the ideals of excellence, practicality, and success bore a portent of revolutionary advances.

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