Here are two dates worth putting next to each other.
Around 1960, the Santa Clara Valley held eighty-five canneries, twenty-three dried-fruit plants, twenty-five frozen-food operations and eighty-five fresh produce packers. It was the largest center for those industries in the world. People called it the Valley of Heart's Delight, and as late as 1965 this was still among the twenty-five most agriculturally productive counties in the United States.
On January 11, 1971, a reporter named Don Hoefler published an article in Electronic News headlined "Silicon Valley USA." It's the first known appearance of the phrase in print.
Eleven years. One generation. The valley went from the world's fruit basket to a metonym for the technology industry, and almost nothing was written down about the towns while it happened. Santa Clara County had well over 100,000 acres of orchard at its peak. It's down to roughly 27,000 acres of farmland of any kind.
These are the towns underneath all that.
Santa Clara
Older than nearly everything around it. Mission Santa Clara de Asís was founded on January 12, 1777 — the eighth of California's twenty-one missions, and the reason the county has its name. Flood, fire and earthquake moved it twice before it settled on its current site in 1822. The church you see now is a rebuild; a fire destroyed the previous one in 1926.
Santa Clara College opened on the mission grounds in 1851 and is, by its own account, California's oldest operating institution of higher learning.
And then there's the thing most people who live there don't know: Santa Clara demolished its own downtown. The council voted in September 1961 to clear the eight-block historic core, and demolition ran through 1964. Franklin Street was the main street. City Hall and the Santa Clara Theater came down with it. A residents' group has spent the last decade campaigning to build a downtown back, and the city adopted a plan in 2023, but the ground is still mostly parking.
One more, on the clock: California's Great America sits on land its operator sold in 2022. The lease runs out in 2028. Fifty-plus years of a valley landmark, with a countdown on it.
Sunnyvale
Two Mexican land grants underneath it — Rancho Pastoria de las Borregas and Rancho Posolmi, granted in 1844 to Lupe Yñigo, an Ohlone man, and named for an Ohlone village. That's an unusual thing in California land records and worth knowing.
A developer laid the town out in 1897 and called it Encinal. It was renamed Sunnyvale in 1901, on the theory that it would sell better than anything that sounded like San Francisco's fog. It was incorporated in 1912. Marketing has been in the groundwater here for a while.
Murphy Avenue is the downtown, and it's real — a short pedestrian block that started as a dirt road to the railroad stop at Murphy's Station in the 1860s. The Heritage Park Museum on Remington is free and open three days a week.
Mountain View
Incorporated on November 7, 1902, with a population of 610. It had been a stagecoach stop on El Camino Real since 1850, and got its name in 1854 from a postmaster who was looking at the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Castro Street is the best downtown in the South Bay and it isn't close. It's been closed to cars since 2020, formalized by the council in 2022, and it works the way a main street is supposed to.
This is also where the silicon in Silicon Valley comes from, literally. Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory opened on San Antonio Road in 1956 — the first company to make silicon semiconductor devices in this valley. Its employees walked out in 1957 to found Fairchild, and everything after that is downstream of that walkout. There is a Computer History Museum on Shoreline that tells the rest of it properly.
Cupertino
The name is older than you'd guess: Arroyo San José de Cupertino, now Stevens Creek, named by a cartographer on the Anza expedition after Saint Joseph of Cupertino. The town incorporated in 1955, out of orchard country — prunes, apricots, cherries, and a winery up on Montebello Ridge.
And here's the honest thing about Cupertino: it has no downtown. It grew from a rural crossroads into an arterial suburb, and the closest thing it has to a center is the dead Vallco mall, now being rebuilt into something called The Rise. A town with the market capitalization of a mid-sized nation and no main street is a genuinely strange thing to stand in.
De Anza College opened in 1967 on a former winery site. The Flint Center, where the Macintosh was launched in 1984, was demolished in 2024. Median home price in mid-2026: about $3.2 million, and unlike most of its neighbors it went up.
Campbell
The orchard town, and the one that still feels like a town.
Benjamin Campbell arrived in 1846 and bought 160 acres in 1851. In 1887 he and his wife Mary subdivided it to create a town and a railroad station, on the correct assumption that all this fruit was going to need shipping. The Campbell Fruit Growers' Union formed in 1892 and ran a seventeen-acre drying yard. Canneries clustered along the tracks. The city incorporated in 1952.
Campbell Avenue is the most intact small-town main street in the South Bay, and it closes every Sunday morning for the farmers market. The Ainsley House, built in 1925 for a canning pioneer named John Colpitts Ainsley, was picked up and moved to its current site in 1990 and is open Friday to Sunday. The Heritage Theatre was built as a high school auditorium in 1938 with WPA money, closed in 1982 for structural reasons, and reopened in 2004 with eight hundred seats.
The Pruneyard shopping center is named for the orchard it replaced, which is about as on-the-nose as this valley gets.
And Campbell put something else into the world: Lars Frederiksen of Rancid grew up here. Born in 1971, raised by his mother Minna, a Danish immigrant and the only member of her family to survive the Nazi occupation of Denmark. He was in juvenile hall by fifteen, out of school, and picked up a guitar to get out. He joined Rancid in 1993 and has been one of the defining guitar players in American punk ever since. Not bad for the Orchard City.
Los Gatos
The Mexican grant was La Rinconada de Los Gatos — Cat's Corner — 6,600 acres given out in 1840 and named for the mountain lions people could hear at night. A hundred acres were picked out as a town site in 1868; the town incorporated in 1887.
It started as a mill town. Forbes Mill was built in 1853 and ground its first flour on December 1, 1855 — the first commercial building in Los Gatos. The four-story mill was torn down in 1916, but the 1880 stone annex is still standing beside the creek, a state historical landmark.
Santa Cruz Avenue and Main Street make the strongest retail downtown of any of these towns. NUMU, the town's museum, is on East Main. And the Los Gatos Creek Trail runs 9.7 miles from Lexington Reservoir down through Los Gatos and Campbell into San Jose — the one place you can move through several of these towns without a car.
Netflix is headquartered here, on Albright Way. Median home price is about $2.75 million.
Saratoga
Founded in 1851 as McCartysville, also called Toll Gate and Bank Mills at various points, and renamed Saratoga in 1865 because someone found mineral springs nearby that reminded them of Saratoga Springs, New York. It incorporated in 1956, largely to keep San Jose from annexing it — a recurring theme down here.
Big Basin Way is the village, and it's walkable. The residential streets deliberately are not: Saratoga has gone without street lights and sidewalks on most of them, on purpose, to stay semi-rural.
Three things worth the drive. Hakone Gardens, established in 1915 as a private retreat, eighteen acres, and one of the oldest residential-style Japanese gardens open to the public in the Western Hemisphere. Montalvo, built between 1912 and 1914 for James Duval Phelan — three-term mayor of San Francisco and California's first popularly elected U.S. Senator — who left it to become one of the first artist residency programs in the United States; it opened to the public in 1939 and still runs a full season.
And the Mountain Winery, which is the best story of the three. Paul Masson bought the hillside in 1901 and built his chateau in 1905. The 1906 earthquake knocked it down. He rebuilt it out of the rubble — including an entrance portal salvaged from a San Jose church the same quake had destroyed. That portal is still in the wall. Winemaking stopped in 1952, concerts started in 1958 with Ella Fitzgerald and Ray Charles, and wine came back in 2004.
Median home price: about $4.17 million, the highest of any town here.
Milpitas
The name comes from Nahuatl by way of Spanish — milpitas, little cornfields, for the small gardens that grew in the alluvial soil. Three ranchos underneath it, including Rancho Milpitas, granted to José María Alviso, whose adobe is still standing and is the oldest structure in town. Incorporated in 1954, to avoid being annexed by San Jose.
There's no real downtown — the older commercial area is called Midtown, and the city grew as a set of separate retail centers.
What Milpitas has instead is the sharpest labor history in the valley. Ford moved its assembly plant from Richmond to Milpitas in 1955, and the Black autoworkers who moved with it ran straight into housing they weren't allowed to buy. Ben Gross — a UAW man from McGehee, Arkansas, who in 1950 had become the first African American elected to his local's bargaining committee — chaired the union's housing committee and helped build Sunnyhills, described as the first planned interracial community in America sponsored by a labor union. In 1966 the town elected him mayor, and re-elected him in 1968.
The Ford plant closed in 1984. The Great Mall opened on the site in 1994. A car factory became an outlet mall, which is the South Bay parable in one sentence.
Milpitas is also the most affordable town on this list — a median around $1.3 million, down nearly 13% year over year. Up in the foothills, Ed R. Levin County Park is where the hang gliders and paragliders launch off toward Monument Peak, which almost nobody outside town knows about.
The fact that should be better known
All that fruit needed water, and the valley pumped it out of the ground for decades without putting any back.
The land sank. The floor of the northern Santa Clara Valley dropped roughly fourteen feet in downtown San Jose, across more than a hundred square miles. Subsidence was first measured around 1915 and wasn't stopped until about 1970, when the water district began recharging the aquifer. Parts of the valley floor — around Alviso, which sank more than six feet — are now below sea level, and are held back from San Francisco Bay by levees.
The orchards drank the valley into the ground, and it never came back up. Millions of people live on ground that is measurably lower than it was when their great-grandparents were planting apricots on it.
Where it all stands
Median home prices across these eight towns in mid-2026 ran from about $1.3 million in Milpitas to $4.17 million in Saratoga — a gap of nearly three million dollars across about twenty minutes of driving. And the direction isn't uniform: Cupertino was up more than 8% while Sunnyvale was down 17%. There is no single "market" here.
The deeper number is the jobs-to-housing ratio. A balanced town runs somewhere around one job per housing unit. Palo Alto is above three. Mountain View and Cupertino are near two and a half. Santa Clara is over two. These towns built the offices and then declined to build the housing, and everybody drives in from somewhere else, which is why the freeways are what they are.
The Valley of Heart's Delight didn't disappear because the fruit stopped growing. It disappeared because the land underneath it became worth more with buildings on it. That happened inside a single lifetime, and the people who remember the orchards are still here.
Rep the valley: the San Jose collection has our California bear flag design made for San Jose, and there's Palo Alto, Fremont and Redwood City up the peninsula. Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Cupertino, Campbell, Los Gatos, Saratoga and Milpitas designs are coming. In the meantime, the full Bay Area and statewide California collections are here.