Best of Picture from the Past
Deal was struck at the centennial exposition
By John S. Baggerly
William A. "Bill" Wulf, a lifelong Los Gatos historian with a particular interest in the steam era of railroading, wrote an article for "The Ferroequinologist" in 1959. This is an excerpt:
The year 1876 was marked in United States history as the first centennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. To celebrate, an exposition was held in Philadelphia. James C. Fair, Comstock silver miner and onetime United States senator from Nevada, was among those who attended.
The Baldwin Locomotive works, proponents of the 3-foot-gauge railroads, exhibited extensively at the exposition, showing off the advantage of narrow-gauge with special emphasis on their economy.
Sen. Fair began to realize that, if the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad Company could construct its railroad through the difficult Colorado mountains, he could construct a line from the Pacific Ocean over the Sierra-Nevada Mountains and on to join with the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad.
He met with officials of the railroad at the exposition and reached an agreement whereby he would start construction of the line that would connect with the Denver & Rio Grande at a place and time to be determined.
The new enterprise was called the South Pacific Coast Railroad, and it was incorporated on March 25, 1876. The immediate plan of the railroad was to construct its line from Alameda to Santa Cruz.
Fair knew that the line through Central Nevada and Utah would tap a still-virgin area and would provide competition to the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads in the north.
Construction proceeded at a rapid pace along the level part of the east shore of San Francisco Bay, and the line pushed through Newark, Santa Clara, San Jose and Campbell.
The residents of Los Gatos were more than excited over the prospect of being placed on the route of a main-line railroad to Colorado. Property in the town of Los Gatos was sold to the railroad for the sum of less than $50.
John Lyndon agreed to sell his property to the railroad if the company would move his hotel, the Ten Mile House, across the street free of charge. Soon, spans of horses pulling scrapers were raising clouds of dust as they leveled and filled the right-of-way into the town.
In Los Gatos the value of property, especially that located on the railroad, doubled and tripled, and a real estate boom was on.
On June l, 1879, a small 22-ton locomotive, that was all spit and polish and the pride of her crew, steamed importantly into the town with a string of wooden, open-ended passenger cars whose varnished sides dazzled the eye.
Since history has not afforded us with a visual or written account of this event, one can only theorize that Los Gatos put on its best Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes and, in a mass of plain and fancy people, children, dogs, carriages, horses and dust, welcomed the travelers from Alameda.
It was now possible to board the steam cars in Los Gatos and ride through the Valley of Hearts Delight to Alameda Point, where the huge side-wheel ferry boats would take the passengers to San Francisco, the Queen City of the West.
John Baggerly is now semi-retired. This column is from the Los Gatos Weekly- Times archives.
Los Gatos, California Since 1881
This Southern Pacific tower, erected on the south side of W. Main Street at the railroad crossing in 1910, stood until 1925.
