A Blossom Festival publicity photo, probably taken in the 1920s.
In Madronia Cemetery, the plaque on the ivy-covered boulder marking the grave of Edwin Sidney Williams, 1837-1918, includes the inscription "Sunshine," as in "Everlasting Sunshine," for his initials E.S., and "Father of the Blossom Festival." In a sense, it could serve as a capsule biography of the man who, the story goes, looked out over the valley from his home on Three Oaks Way in March 1899 and realized that the drenching just past would revive orchards that had suffered from recent years of very low rainfall.
He envisioned the profusion of blooms the following spring, and he set about planning the "thanksgiving jollification" that would grow into the Saratoga Blossom Festival. "Everlasting Sunshine" was a retired Congregational minister who practiced what he preached. The following winter he succeeded in convincing sometimes skeptical townspeople that they could put on an event that would impress even sophisticated city folk. The main attraction, of course, would be the blossoms, which were, as the saying goes, something no tourist should miss.
On March 20, 1900, four carloads of visitors detrained at the South Pacific Coast Railroad station in Los Gatos, attracted by descriptive invitations published in the San Francisco newspapers. Among the vehicles meeting them were brightly painted wagons from the storied Glen Una Ranch, largest prune-bearing orchard in the world, as well as the buggies and buckboards of Saratoga residents. The four-mile drive, much of it through avenues of blossoms, was worth anyone's train trip. In Saratoga there were sports and entertainment for the visitors; townspeople opened their homes, and those who hadn't brought lunches could get a home-cooked meal for 25 cents at Cloud's Hall.
Its success guaranteed by that first year, the Blossom Festival grew in scope. From homespun entertainment and athletic contests there grew elaborately choreographed children's ballets. In 1914 a colorful parade on an international theme commemorated the linking of nations through the new Panama Canal.
As the festival grew, locations were changed. One of the first sites was the Village Green, under a huge oak adjacent to the Saratoga Foothill Club. Construction of the clubhouse made a move necessary in 1915, to the natural amphitheater on Saratoga Avenue, now the site of the Saratogan condominiums, where a platform was built on the flat and several thousand spectators could be seated on the hillside. That 1915 Blossom Festival was to have been a real bell-ringer. This was the year of the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, to which President Woodrow Wilson had been invited, and Saratoga, through the influence of Sen. James D. Phelan, was going to get in on the big doings. However, with war boiling over in Europe, Wilson felt he couldn't attend, so he sent Vice President Thomas R. Marshall. Phelan planned to obtain, as Blossom Festival speakers, the vice president; the eloquent assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt; and, perhaps, Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane and Assistant Secretary of State William Phillips--what you might call an all-star cast. As described by Saratoga historian Florence R. Cunningham in her book Saratoga's First Hundred Years, there was one catch to all this: It rained. Hard. The kind of rain that moved "Everlasting Sunshine" Williams to express gratitude through a thanksgiving jollification.
The distinguished guests adjourned to Phelan's Villa Montalvo for their own jollification, and the disappointed festivalgoers went home.
In a future Stereopticon article I will describe some subsequent Blossom Festivals that didn't get rained out.
This article appeared in the Saratoga News, February 19, 1997.
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