The property where HP and the barn are located once belonged to the Glendenning family. Robert Glendenning and his wife, Margaret Howie, met on a ship that sailed from Scotland to San Francisco in 1850. Robert walked from San Francisco to Cupertino and purchased 160 acres northeast of Cupertino for $30 an acre. The couple built a farm, including the barn, in 1889.

To honor the Glendenning family, HP put a plaque on the barn and dedicated the barn as a historical monument on March 5.

"When I was 4 or 5 years old, my sister and I got to go to the barn by ourselves. It was stacked with rows and rows of orchard boxes and equipment," said Beez Glendenning Jones, whose great-grandfather was Robert Glendenning. "The barn was a gathering place for families and neighbors."

It still is.

It's an HP tradition to have a Friday afternoon beer bust here. The company also has its annual barbecue near the barn. Over the years, King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh have visited the humble barn as guests of HP.

"We call this campus our apricot division because some of the farmers found their way into the orchard for afternoon snacks," said Laine Meyer, vice president of HP real estate and workplace services.

In some ways, both the Glendenning family and HP demonstrate the entrepreneurship that has transformed the Santa Clara Valley.

When the valley was called the "Valley of Heart's Delight," the Glendenning family went from dry farming, which means depending upon the rain, to irrigated orchards and developed a large fruit-growing enterprise. Jones' father spent most of his life working for Anderson-Barngrover, a San Jose company that invented an assembly-line method for canning and freezing orange juice. During apricot season, 350,000 tons of apricots were dried and dehydrated.

"Other ranchers would bring their apricots to the dehydrator on our family farm to have their fruit dried," Jones, 79, said. "My family's dehydrator was the biggest one in the area."

In a Palo Alto garage, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard founded HP in 1939 and invented the company's first product, an audio oscillator—an electronic test instrument used by sound engineers. HP bought the Cupertino property in 1971. Now the once two-man company has 142,000 employees worldwide and serves more than 1 billion customers in more than 160 countries on five continents.

The connection between HP and the Glendenning family is far deeper than a land transaction.

Like Hewlett and Packard, 10 members of the Glendenning family, including Jones, are alumni of the Farm, a nickname for Stanford University. Actually, Jones' cousin Burrel Leonard was a classmate of Hewlett and Packard at Stanford.

At the ceremony, Jones' children and five grandchildren visited the barn.

"My grandchildren are the sixth generation that has lived in Cupertino," Jones said. "We could have gone to any place, but we stay here."