Photo courtesy of Scott Rose, treasurer and host of San Jose Post Card Club
Among the sights enjoyed during the Blossom Festival was this blooming prune orchard, which boasted 300,000 trees.
Last week, Saratoga News columnist Willys Peck told how the Rev. "Sunshine" Williams started the Saratoga Blossom Festival as a thanksgiving after a two-year drought threatened Santa Clara Valley's fruit orchards.
The mountains at the edge of Saratoga and Los Gatos formed a natural amphitheater at blossom time.
For 40 years, from March of 1900 to 1940, the year before the United States entered World War II, the festival was an annual event. In 1977, the event was renewed with several events.
Early on, Los Gatos supported the event with transportation, and in the 1920s, when San Jose tried to usurp the festival, the Los Gatos Mail-News denounced the highjacking with a front-page, eight-column headline. Saratoga, too, flexed its muscles, and the county's largest city limped away.
During the first years of the festival, Williams was the official greeter at the Los Gatos train depot, where carloads of visitors from Alameda disembarked. San Franciscans crossed the bay by ferryboat to catch the Los Gatos-bound train from Alameda.
Visitors were carted from the depot to Saratoga in a fleet of horse-drawn wagons from the huge Hume Ranch on Glen Una Drive. In the beds of fruit wagons were seats composed of planks on fruit boxes. Florence R. Cunningham recalls in Saratoga's First Hundred Years that at one early festival, there was a crush at the Los Gatos depot, and "Sunshine" Williams was left behind. The only way for him to get to the festival was by shank's mare. Fortunately, after walking some distance, he was given a ride to Saratoga by a passing traveler.
Los Gatos joined in the festival spirit with events such as a long-gone tennis tournament. This April's Blossom Festival Golf Tournament at La Rinconada Country Club would have been the 50th had not the board of directors cancelled a group of "outside tournaments" this year for the convenience of members.
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, February 26, 1997.
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