Los Gatos Weekly-Times file photograph
Admission Day--not the Fourth of July--was a time of high celebration in early Los Gatos as indicated by this Sept. 9, 1850, photograph of the welcoming arch at the wooden Main Street bridge. Native Sons of the Golden West were very big at the time.
Credit Town Manager David Knapp with jump-starting a search for how Los Gatos celebrated the Fourth of July in the past. Always looking for a subject for this column, we volunteered to interview folks with long memories.
First phone call went to Thelma Rhinelander, a native of Los Gatos, daughter of butcher/constable Elmer Springer and a resident of Almendra Avenue.
"Yes, we celebrated the Fourth," said Thelma, the wife of longtime local druggist Judi Rhinelander. "Everyone along Almendra had their own firecrackers and shot them off in their own yards."
Next native Los Gatan to be called was Elaine Shore Shuman, whose ancestors donated property that became Bunker Hill Park (then Memorial Park after the first World War) and located along the creek immediately south of the Main Street bridge before the freeway took over.
"On holidays and weekends, the train [which ran through what is now the Town Plaza] brought in hundreds of passengers headed for the park, but I don't recall fireworks at the park."
Next call when to historian Bill Wulf, who said that rockets were fired from the earliest wooden bridges without starting fires thanks to Chinese laborers who cleaned the hillsides and railroad right-of-ways when the rail route to Santa Cruz was built in the l880s.
Wulf recommended a call to fellow historian Wilma Thompson, who came to Los Gatos with her parents in 1927. She recalls her father motoring with her and brother Bill to the high reaches of Blossom Hill Road and observing Fourth of July fireworks in Santa Clara Valley and Bay Area beyond.
For genuine local fireworks, we turned to "The History of Los Gatos" by George G. Bruntz. He wrote: "In 1925, another unusual business was started in Los Gatos, when Fred Hitt and Sam Young began to manufacture fireworks at their Daves Avenue plant. Fourth of July celebrations just were not complete without the Hitt and Young spectaculars. Later they manufactured railway fuses and highway flares.
"Over 30 years the Hitt Company manufactured fireworks and fuses in Los Gatos. The business was sold in 1941 to the Central Railway Company of Boston, which changed the name to Pacific Railway Company. Later it was sold to the Olin Mathieson Company. In September 1953, the local plant was heavily damaged by a spectacular fire which caused more than $75,000 damage. In 1955 the company moved to Morgan Hill."
Hitt's plant and a chapel he built on his high ground overlooked Los Gatos proper, Santa Clara Valley and San Francisco Bay beyond. Hitt was the pastor at his chapel. His children attended local schools.
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, August 21, 1996.
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