The Valley Before Silicon

The Valley Before Silicon

Before the chips came the acorns, the chokes, the prunes, and a sea of white blossoms.

Drive through the Peninsula today and you'll pass glass campuses, logos, and a lot of very expensive parking. A century ago, the same drive meant orchards in every direction. Every spring the whole valley floor turned white and pink.

We think about this a lot at Rootstock. We deliver produce along streets that once ran through one of the world’s largest fruit-growing regions.

Before the Orchards

Long before anyone planted a prune tree, this valley was already a food landscape. Native peoples, including the Ohlone, tended this land for more than 10,000 years. By one common estimate, some 10,000 Ohlone lived between San Francisco and Big Sur in the mid-1700s, and their year followed what each season offered.

Acorns came first. Families gathered them in the hills each fall and ground them into meal for porridge and bread. Spring brought grass and wildflower seeds, summer brought hazelnuts and berries, and winter brought salmon runs and shellfish. Ducks and geese filled the bay’s marshes, and people crossed the water in boats of bundled tule reeds. They also set regular fires on the grasslands to bring on fresh seed the following spring.

Then the missions arrived. Spanish authorities outlawed the burning to protect their cattle, and grazing crowded out many native plants. Disease and the loss of traditional ways took a heavy toll on Ohlone communities. But the Ohlone are still here, and many are reviving traditional practices today.

 

Ohlone Native American Tribal Gathering by Ed Bierman via Flickr

A Valley of Blossoms

The missions also planted the valley’s first orchards, but the real boom came after the Gold Rush. In 1856, the Pellier brothers introduced the French prune plum to San Jose, and the valley took to it. By 1890, some 4.5 million fruit trees stood on the valley floor: prunes, apricots, cherries, pears, peaches, and apples.

By the 1920s, about 86 percent of the valley's land was in agriculture. At its peak, more than 100,000 acres were planted in orchards, and dozens of canneries packed the harvest for the world. Everyone worked in fruit one way or another: growing, picking, drying, packing, canning. Author Anne Marie Todd notes that school didn't start until the prunes were in.

The stakes were real. In September 1918, with prunes drying on trays across the valley, a sudden storm hit, and the federal government sent 1,000 soldiers to help save the crop. Prunes were that important.

It earned a name worthy of the place: the Valley of Heart's Delight.

 

Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site | Once the orchard was... by NPS CulturalLandscapes via Flickr

The Artichoke Coast

Now for the artichokes. They weren't in the valley. They grew over the hills, along the foggy San Mateo coast.

Italian immigrants, reportedly including some from the artichoke-growing Po Valley, found that Half Moon Bay's cool, damp summers suited the artichoke perfectly. By around the time of the 1906 earthquake, about 1,500 acres were planted, and the area earned the nickname "the Artichoke Coast." Half Moon Bay was once described as a cluster of houses surrounded by artichokes. The Debenedetti family, among the coast’s largest growers and shippers, farmed about 1,000 acres from the 1880s into the 1970s, and its patriarch was known as the Artichoke King.

In the early 1920s, a Monterey County landowner spotted the crop on the San Mateo coast and carried it south to Castroville, just beyond the Bay Area. Castroville now supplies about two-thirds of the nation’s artichokes, and the artichoke is California’s official vegetable. But the story began here, on the Bay Area’s own coast.

 

Near Half Moon Bay, California coast. Artichoke farms reach to the water's edge by Dorothea Lange via Library of Congress

What Happened to the Valley

By the 1950s, about 4,000 people a month were moving into Santa Clara County. Its population grew from nearly 300,000 in 1950 to over a million in 1970. Stanford founded its Industrial Park in 1951, drawing companies like Hewlett-Packard. Orchards gave way to subdivisions, shopping centers, and office parks.

On January 11, 1971, journalist Don Hoefler ran a series in Electronic News titled "Silicon Valley U.S.A." It was the first time the name appeared in print. The Heart's Delight was already fading.

Novelist Wallace Stegner, who had settled at Stanford, wrote in 1965 that the valley’s orchards were disappearing so fast that someone gone for five years could return and feel they’d landed in another country. In 1987, the Sunsweet packing plant in Morgan Hill closed. In August 2026, the New York Times reported that Andy Mariani plans to sell his family’s orchard, which they bought in 1957, if county officials approve. He will keep farming 20 leased acres. At midcentury, an estimated 109,000 acres in the valley were orchards. Today, fewer than 4,000 remain.

 

Silicon Valley, facing southward towards Downtown San Jose by Coolcaesar via Wikimedia Commons

Still Growing, Just Differently

The farmland didn’t vanish. It moved, and so did the people who farm it. Fifth Crow Farm and Blue House Farm work the Pescadero coast, across the hills from Silicon Valley and down the road from the old Artichoke Coast. Live Earth Farm and the other berry growers we work with in Watsonville carry on in the Pajaro Valley, and Oya Organics tends vegetable rows in Hollister. Farther inland, Full Belly Farm in the Capay Valley and Masumoto Family Farm in Del Rey grow stone fruit, vegetables, and more. They all carry the same traditions: soil, sun, and people who care about flavor.

The valley's history is a reminder that eating locally isn't a new idea. For a hundred years, it was just how things worked.

When farms thrive, we thrive. Thank you for being part of it.

Want to dig deeper?

  • Malcolm Margolin, The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco-Monterey Bay Area.

  • M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources.

  • Anne Marie Todd, Valley of Heart's Delight: Environment and Sense of Place in the Santa Clara Valley. 

  • Robin Chapman, California Apricots: The Lost Orchards of Silicon Valley.

  • Lisa Prince Newman, For the Love of Apricots: Recipes and Memories of the Santa Clara Valley.

  • David Mas Masumoto, Epitaph for a Peach.

  • Pellow and Park, The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy.

  • Visit the Historic Orchard at Guadalupe River Park & Gardens in San Jose, a living piece of the valley's fruit heritage.

Sources


Back to blog

Share