Bill Wulf kneels by some railroad ties left over from the days when a trolley ran between Saratoga and Los Gatos. Saratoga-Los Gatos Road is behind him. Wulf said that these ties are the only ones he knows of that still exist.

Old Ways

Local historians uncover trails to the past

By Oakley Brooks

Photographs by Jeff Kearns

Willys Peck tiptoes along the shoulder of Congress Springs Road, trying his best to avoid the Saturday morning traffic. He remembers an old stairwell that led from the road, down the embankment toward the mineral springs from which the road gets its name. More than a century ago, the Pacific Congress Springs catered to the elite of the Bay Area, who stayed in a swank hotel across the street and trekked over a dirt road to the therapeutic springs. A chain-link fence, since erected by the San Jose Water Company, prevents Peck from using anything but the road to get to the stairwell. Careening motorcycles cars carrying sightseers and hikers up and down Congress Springs add a little adventure to his quest.

Peck comes to the stairs, but the fence continues right over them, leaving only the end of one railing.

A "No Trespassing" sign figures prominently on a post nearby and ends any hopes of walking down the stairs in search of the abandoned springs. Instead, Peck peers through the fence and listens to the rush of oncoming cars.

It was a familiar sound during a recent weekend spent exploring the West Valley with local historians of all stripes. The ring of movement and growth-- life rumbling by. And in the midst of that din, Peck and three others, driven by strong imaginations, made an effort to pause and uncover the history in their midst. In a place where generations are sometimes measured in months, they believe their work is not just nostalgic, but vital. It's a difficult endeavor, however, given the realities of the area's living environment.

Peck works his way up Congress Springs Road, past a tree-dotted meadow that once held picnic parties of people, carried directly here by trolley from San Jose. A scant mile up the road is the present day picnic ground of Saratoga Springs; Peck, a Saratoga native, used to have Sunday school lunches here, but hasn't been here in years: "Good God," he says, noting the low residence buildings and RVs. He parks to look for the former sawmill site that William Campbell built beside Saratoga Creek in 1848--drawing the first European settlement to Saratoga. Two walls of a vintage stone building are nestled behind a large Chevy Van. Peck creeps behind the van to look at the historical placard.

"At least they don't try to pass this off as the mill," he says of the remnants of a small bunkhouse.


Cupertino trail activist Steve Haze stands on a knoll near Rancho San Antonio Park, where he hopes to locate an interpretive site about the 1776 De Anza expedition's trek through the West Valley.




Peck, 77, is always wary of how history is kept in Saratoga because among residents he is, perhaps, the foremost keeper. His lifetime spans a dramatic transformation of Saratoga from orchard town to Silicon Valley's bedroom--"I came with the territory"--and he's tried to drag pieces of a bygone Saratoga with him. The front room of his house holds old railroad relics and yellowing pictures. In his yard, is a vintage wicker trolley-stop shelter, from the city's streetcar days. As a member of the Saratoga Historic Preservation Commission he's part of the city's effort to protect historically significant buildings in the face of widespread home reconstruction.

But it's the over-sized new homes that irk him the most.

Standing in the midst of the picnic grounds, with 99-year-old Saratoga Creek Bridge behind him, Peck slips easily into a discussion of how the developments are ravishing the complexion of his hometown. It's not a new lament from old-time Saratogans, many of whom, like Peck, bought their modest homes for what, today, it costs to heat larger ones. But, after touching what Peck thinks are the two oldest structures left in Saratoga--the stairwell and the bunkhouse-- the argument takes on a new shape.

"We even have friends up there now," he says, pointing to a development farther up Congress Springs Road.


Streetcar tracks from San Jose split into two spurs at this station in Saratoga Village: one line carried people up to the picnic grounds at Congress Springs, another to Los Gatos.




Streetcars to San Jose

The next morning, Bill Wulf stands on tranquil Mendelsohn Lane and blows a long, slow note on his old train whistle.

"Just think, once that could be heard all over the valley," says Wulf. "And when it was in bloom--I remember that when I was a kid--it was like perfume. God, it was beautiful."

Wulf, 62, pulls a stash of black and white photos from the trunk of his car and shows a shot of a streetcar, heading across the wooden Bonny Brae trestle toward Los Gatos The trestle stood under our feet.

For 25 years beginning in 1904, the streetcars clattered throughout the West Valley, carrying city recreationists out to the leafy canyons and sweet smelling fruit groves at the base of the foothills, and bringing commuters into San Jose or linking them to San Francisco trains. Wulf grew up in Los Gatos, but missed out on riding the trolleys by about 15 years, after the growing popularity of the automobile pushed them out.

But with a slew of props and a quick, toothy smile, Los Gatos' town historian easily conjures up the world of rails.

Winding through back roads on the former route between Saratoga and Los Gatos, Wulf notices the tiny bridges of early century stonework that carried the streetcars over streams. Someone has lined his yard with railroad ties. "See, little do they know," says Wulf, catching the person's unwitting hint at the past

We shoot across Saratoga-Los Gatos Road onto Austin Way and pull to a stop where it meets Quito Road.

This was the infamously tight Austin Corners, where many a street-car slipped on wet oak leaves and turned on its side. Wulf says that streetcar accidents in the West Valley were common. Cars reached 55 mph on straightaways and the network relied on conductors to manually flip switches on one-way tracks. He produces a small ticket the Penninsular Railway Company used to hand to passengers involved in wrecks, to "Exonerate the Trainman" from responsibility.

Austin Corners is a bittersweet spot for Wulf now. Until a few years ago, the last section of visible rail in the West Valley still poked through the pavement here. Wulf had an ally in county government,--which monitors Monte Sereno's roads --who kept the rails exposed. But when that county commissioner left office, the rails were covered with a fresh coat of asphalt.

"It breaks my heart," Wulf says, standing on the spot. "But they're still under there."

A stretch of the streetcar right-of-way still exists at the top of Quito Road and we head up to see it. A few old ties jut out from under the earth. Again, Wulf has a picture of a trolley on this spot. Two middle-aged women speed-walk by as he produces the image.

"Wanna see what this used to look like?" Wulf entices them.

They're all ears, taken up by Wulf's recollection.

"That's not that long ago," one of them says.


Heading east on Austin Way, the Pennisula Railway trolley made a sharp turn onto Quito Road just in front of the house pictured. Los Gatos historian Bill Wulf says the corner was the site of several streetcar wrecks.




Later, when we have finished retracing the old route, Wulf pauses in the front seat of his car.

"It's getting more and more difficult to recreate the past," he says. "The only place you can see it is in photographs.

"What worries me is there so many people coming in that don't appreciate these historical things and they just want to tear things down and build their own. But the Indians probably said the same thing when we came."

American Indian Settlement

"Grizzly bear," says Alan Leventhal, 49, pointing down into Los Gatos Creek. In the hot afternoon, a yellow Labrador splashes into the stream after a stick. Seven generations ago, there might have been a grizzly at this very spot, just south of Main Street. Certainly, there were fish to be had: Leventhal reckons steelhead trout and salmon once made regular runs up the creek to spawn. And there were American Indians settled here, though scant archeological evidence allows Leventhal, an anthropologist with the local Muwekma tribe, to only guess exactly where and how large the settlement would have been.

American Indians along the creek would have centered much of their calander on the fish runs, hosting festivals and bringing in neighboring tribes when the waters were flush. They would have buried their dead in elaborate tombs, similar to the one excavated in the early 1970s in Saratoga Village. There, ornate beads made from Sierra Nevada obsidian and carved abalone shells from the coast gave evidence of wide trading networks in the area.

Leventhal says the American Indians along the Los Gatos Creek could have extended their influence up into the Santa Cruz mountains and over into Almaden Valley.


Los Gatos historian Bill Wulf superimposes an old picture of a rail trestle on the present day scene near the junction of Quito and Los Gatos-Saratoga Roads.




Any influence over the land dissipated dramatically in the late 1700s, when European microbes ravaged the native populations and the Mexican immigrants, centered at San Jose and Santa Clara missions, claimed control of the land in the valley. That put local American Indians in a permanent state of flux.

In 1980, Leventhal, who teaches anthropology at San Jose State, received a call from a South Bay Ohlone elder named Rosemary Cambra, asking for assistance in reaffirming her tribe's place in California. Leventhal told her that the prevailing wisdom from celebrated California anthropologists such as Alfred Kroeber, was that the Ohlones were extinct.

"She said, 'We're not dead,' " Leventhal recalls.

In fact, when Leventhal began talking further with Cambra, friends and family--who called themselves Ohlones--he discovered that the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs had recognized them and their relatives, at least three times this century, as a viable tribe. Reality contradicted popular academic perception.

Driven to change that perception and alarmed by the rapid pace of building in the region that's uncovering American Indian cultural sites, Cambra and other tribal leaders in the South Bay have worked with Leventhal to increase the tribe's presence in the archeological process. They've set up their own consulting firm to assist in excavations of cultural sites, now required by state law if evidence is found on building lots. Several years ago, the tribe participated in an American Indian historical display at Los Gatos' Forbes Mill Museum.

The South Bay Ohlones, who now call themselves the "Muwekma"--a local indigenous word meaning "the people," have also worked with Leventhal to trace their ancestry back to the mission era.

Reaffirmation continues to be an uphill struggle. Leventhal says the tribes' reports are often discounted by the academic community and discarded by local authorities. But, he sticks with the tribe because he understands what credence "a white, educated male" lends to its efforts in today's culture.

"You have to see tangible benefits with the culture you're studying," he says. "The tribe is what validates the anthropology."


Anthropologist Alan Leventhal stands in front of the Forbes Mill Museum in Los Gatos. The mill has hosted American Indian historical exhibits in the past and Leventhal thinks the nearby Los Gatos Creek has a long history of American Indian settlement.




Back on the Los Gatos Creek trail, Leventhal walks near roaring Highway 17. The creek leaves a straight concrete channel and begins to meander over rock beds in its trickle towards Vasona Lake. As it bends west and a housing development appears on an embankment to the east, Leventhal slips back into thoughts of native settlement here. He suggests that, if the stream here flows close to its natural course, a village may have been where townhomes now stand. They would have wanted to stay high enough to avoid seasonal floods, which carried large Volkswagen-sized boulders out of the Santa Cruz mountains. But they wanted to remain close enough to access the fish runs.

Conjecture only holds Leventhal's attention for so long. He would really like to know what lies undiscovered along the creek.

"We can't even find an archeological site and yet we know there was settlement all along here," he says. "You build on top of them and then you shroud them in myth."

There are some firsthand clues about what native life was like in the Santa Clara Valley in the days before heavy European settlement. One of the most detailed records comes from the diary of Franciscan Friar Pedro Font, who accompanied Spanish Lt. Juan Bautista de Anza on his trek from northern Mexico to the Bay Area in 1775-6.

Making its way over Tulare Hill through the Almaden Valley and into the West Valley along the edge of the Santa Cruz Mountains, the expedition encountered dozens of villages and wave upon wave of American Indians--some extending a hand in trade, others resisting De Anza's advance. Font also described the vast expanse of redwood stands, oak savannas and a network of seasonal pools in the lowlands surrounding the bay.

"They talked of an Eden," says Steve Haze from atop a grassy knoll near Cupertino's Rancho San Antonio County Park. Today, the landscape is a material version of its former self. Every tree has a house hiding behind it. Snaking freeways replace vernal pools. But from this hill, Haze has a clear shot south into the Almaden Valley and north to a sketchy San Francisco skyline. He can make out De Anza's general route up the west side of the bay. From here, Haze, a 50-year-old high-tech consultant, likes to squint and drift back into time.

"It's a good place to imagine," he says.

In years past, De Anza expedition re-enactment groups have used the hill as part of demonstrations, and this March, on the 225th anniversary of the Spanish trek, religious leaders, Ohlone tribal members, trail enthusiasts and even descendants of the De Anza party held a commemorative ceremony on top of the knoll.

Haze is trying to get local residents hooked on a specific piece of the area's past, by bringing them to this same spot.


Saratoga historian Willys Peck gazes down a stairway from the old Pacific Congress Springs resort. Guests would have headed down the steps toward the therapeutic minerals baths.




In 1990, the National Park Service established the De Anza route as a National Historic Trail and since 1993, Haze has been rallying Santa Clara County government agencies and civic groups to establish walking, biking or other means of travel along the historic trail. He's currently pushing for a proposed trail through the West Valley, along the Union Pacific Rail corridor, to be designated the De Anza historical route. It would link Los Gatos, Campbell and Saratoga with designated historical sites in Cupertino and end on the hill overlooking the western bay.

Haze drops down to the valley floor and makes his way south by car, following--in reverse--a rough approximation of De Anza's route. He crisscrosses the rail corridor, pausing on the tracks to have a hopeful look at the potential trail. We stop at historical markers at Stevens Creek and Monte Vista High schools, and pull off to gaze at Calabazas Creek on the Saratoga-Cupertino border, where one descendent of the De Anza party believes the expedition spent the night of March 25, 1776. The night is a source of small debate among historians; a marker at Stevens Creek claims De Anza's party slept there.

And, in between stops, he winds through nameless streets lined by houses and strip malls. It's here that Haze realizes clearly the need for the interpretive trail.

"This is just a road," he says. "It doesn't stimulate thought on how things were yesterday, and how you want things to be tomorrow."

It's historical perspective that leads Wulf to admit that California's recent past has been a dynamic mix of cultures and lifestyles. "It's been a melting pot," he says, noting the latest impact of the Asian community on the Bay Area.


The Bonnie Brae trestle carried the Peninsular Railway trolley over a gulley near Mendelsohn Lane in Saratoga in the early part of the century. The denuded Saratoga foothills sit in the background.




As Peck notes, local perspective on changes, even large homes, shifts through time. "Nobody said there goes the neighborhood when Senator Phelan built Villa Montalvo in 1912," says Peck.

But Peck adds that people were fewer and time moved slower then, and, now, in the rush of life on the western side of the Santa Clara Valley pieces, even recollections, of the past are at a premium.

Under the cool shadow of a bridge over Los Gatos Creek, Alan Leventhal squats beside a handful of scattered Budweiser bottles and a discarded neon lighter. He's calling this a "modern archeological site". The bottles: too small for storage, probably for drinking. And the lighter might have used for smoking something, perhaps ceremonially. A ring of charred earth sits near the artifacts. Leventhal dates this as older than the gathering of bottles.

Walking up the trail, Leventhal looks back at the site, days old, but already history.

"You can see how ethereal things are."

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