If time journey have been attainable and also you have been zapped again greater than 100 years into the previous within the Santa Clara Valley, chances are high chances are you’ll be on a prepare rolling right into a commuter cease known as Los Altos Depot. As your prepare barrels into the station, chances are you’ll spot younger males on bicycles going to work at a close-by fruit cannery, their lunch packs dangling from the handlebar. Only a 10 minute stroll eastward from the station you’ll spot a Craftsman model home nestled in the course of a sprawling apricot farm, designed and constructed by a carpenter known as J. Gilbert Smith.
In 1901, when he was 25 years outdated, Smith purchased 5 acres alongside the unpaved two-lane Giffin Highway, “a little dirt lane” that snaked all the way in which from El Camino Actual as much as La Honda. Now known as San Antonio Highway, it was then used for redwood logging. Gilbert Smith pitched a tent on his property — “amidst the owl clover and California poppies” — whereas constructing a home and tank tower. These buildings nonetheless stand right this moment, having survived one of many space’s worst earthquakes in 1906.
The comfy Smith bungalow is now a everlasting historic exhibit at Los Altos Historical past Museum. The Los Altos Heritage Orchard proper by the museum is the oldest city-owned heritage orchard left within the Bay Space. Planted in 1901 by Smith, it was offered to the newly included metropolis of Los Altos in 1954 when architect Frank Lloyd Wright “urged city officials to incorporate the orchard in their design,” in line with Robin Chapman’s guide titled “California Apricots: The Lost Orchards of Silicon Valley.”
To construct his residence, J. Gilbert Smith chosen the redwood — at the price of $15 per 1,000 sq. toes — and it in artistic methods: Alongside the porch are unfinished trunks that evoke the forest. (Kalpana Mohan for the Bay Space Information Group)
Outdoors the Smith Home you possibly can see a palm that’s supposedly a cousin of the bushes that adorn Stanford College’s Palm Drive. Adorned and populated as a Despair-era residence, the Smith Home is full of many nostalgic surprises inside. Smith constructed his two-story residence utilizing redwood transported from the Santa Cruz Mountains. He personally chosen the redwood boards — at the price of $15 per 1,000 sq. toes — and used wooden in probably the most artistic methods. All alongside the porch are unfinished wood trunks that evoke the forest as quickly as we stroll as much as the home. Inside, we see the imaginative craftsmanship of a person who wore three hats, that of an architect, a designer and a carpenter, who conceived of hidden pocket doorways, pull-out storage bins within the kitchen, a break up stairwell and a built-in ironing board over a century in the past.
A slew of curiosities additionally makes a go to to the place worthwhile for each adults and kids alike. Each object from over a century in the past begins a dialog: The darning egg in the lounge, the circa Eighties sq. Steinway piano with its elaborately carved music desk, the radio that appears extra like a jukebox, the treadle stitching machine with its adjustable model and the myriad self-importance objects on the dresser within the bed room. There’s additionally an orchard workplace in the home (because it at all times was again within the day) with a typewriter, including machine and a ledger on apricot gross sales. Outdoors within the backyard, between the primary museum and the Smith Home, is a picnic spot; guests can use the picnic tables and the encircling grounds, which embrace the historic apricot orchard and enormous oak bushes.
The J. Gilbert Smith Home comprises many dialog items just like the circa Eighties sq. Steinway piano with its elaborately carved music desk. (Kalpana Mohan for the Bay Space Information Group)
Together with the remainder of Los Altos Historical past Museum, the Smith Home introduces us to the story of outdated Los Altos with its sweeping vistas, rolling hills and homes in the course of huge apricot orchards. The Southern Pacific Railroad chugged by means of these lands, connecting San Francisco with San Jose and different cities. One canny actual property agent noticed the benefit of finding a commuter metropolis on that railroad line. Thus, the town of Los Altos was born.
Lower than a century after Smith constructed his home, proper across the 12 months 1976, a younger man raised in Los Altos by the identify of Steve Jobs and his buddy Steve Wozniak would assemble the primary 50 Apple I computer systems at Jobs’ childhood residence on 2066 Crist Drive. The late Jobs is meant to have known as Los Altos a “paradise” due to the apricot orchards, and he by no means forgot that atmosphere from his childhood. Right this moment, the grounds at Apple Park in Cupertino, the company headquarters of Apple Inc., are residence to over 9,000 bushes, together with apricot, apple, cherry and olive varieties, amongst many others; Jobs wished to carry again the agricultural surroundings and bear in mind the legacy of the world earlier than the disruption by Silicon Valley’s engineers and server farms.
Classic telephones and furnishings enhance the historic J. Gilbert Smith Home in Los Altos. (Kalpana Mohan for the Bay Space Information Group)
A glimmer of outdated Los Altos nonetheless reaches out to us right this moment within the type of the everlasting exhibit contained in the Los Altos Historical past Museum itself. On the primary ground a prepare exhibit occupies a complete wall. We see how the Santa Cruz Mountains type a dramatic backdrop to all of the township’s shops, evoking how the Santa Clara Valley regarded on the flip of the final century. As we watch the setup behind the glass, it looks like we’re again in 1905, trying towards a future wonderland of immense potentialities.
A black steam engine vanishes right into a tunnel on the left. In seconds, we see a small crimson streetcar roll to a cease; this interurban Peninsular Railway related cities like San Jose, Palo Alto, Los Gatos and Saratoga. Minutes later, we watch the identical black steam locomotive rumble again from the hills on the correct into the Los Altos Depot of the Southern Pacific Railroad, a station that, over 100 years later, is a restaurant known as Bluestone Lane at what’s now First Avenue. “All Aboard!” shouts a male voice over the din. The prepare trundles out of the station as soon as extra, bringing us again into the right here and now of housing nightmares, IPO needs and caviar goals.
When you go: Los Altos Historical past Museum
J. Gilbert Smith Home: Open noon-4 p.m. Thursdays-Sundays, 51 S. San Antonio Highway, Los Altos, free admission; losaltoshistory.org
Adorned as a Despair-era residence, the Smith Home is full of many nostalgic surprises. (Kalpana Mohan for the Bay Space Information Group)
