The Willow Glen Resident

Photograph courtesy of San Jose Historical Museum

Tough Commute: Just like the El Niño floods this year, the deluge of 1911 made the going tricky. In this March photo, an early auto zips through the swamp of Santa Clara Street in downtown San Jose.

'It could happen again,' warns historian of huge floods of past

Deluge of 1862 forced man to swim home in Los Gatos Creek

By Christine M. Lias

Let's go back into the far reaches of local history. To 1862, before Starbucks, the Internet or automobiles.

Even then, the minds of Willow Glen residents focused on the same thing that their descendants gripe about over decaf lattes.

Rain. Lots of rain.

It is January 1862. The area now known as Silicon Valley is submerged in water, in the midst of what is arguably the worst flood ever. Willow Glen is just a stagnant mess of swamps and marshes.

James Alexander Forbes is trying to get home to Santa Clara after a long day's work in Los Gatos. Forbes owns a flour mill in Los Gatos, now the Forbes Flour Mill Museum on Main Street, and a mansion in Santa Clara. To get home, he takes his team of horses along Los Gatos Creek.

There's just one problem. The creek is flooded, as is the ground that Forbes' team of horses is trying to wade through. The water is rising. He is surrounded by quicksand. His mood has become as gray as the sky.

So Forbes swims home. It takes him a whole day.

Los Gatos historian Bill Wulf discovered the story of Forbes' feat while reading letters Forbes had written to friends and relatives back East, which Wulf found in a Sacramento library. And from those letters Wulf pieced together the woes of the winter of 1861-62, which he calls the wettest in San Jose history.

One of Forbes' letters, from Jan. 15, 1862, says that the rain started Nov. 10 and hadn't yet stopped. Forbes also wrote about horses being drowned, roads flooded and property damaged.

And it looks as though the weather's going for another record this year as the Bay Area is deluged with El Nino's rainy welcome.

"What happened then could happen again," Wulf said.

There are no records of the floods of that bygone winter in Santa Clara Valley. The San Jose newspapers did not print for three months, possibly due to flooding. When printing resumed for one publication on May 15, 1862, only a passing reference was made to the previous rains.

Yet Wulf remains convinced that the floods did occur. In San Francisco, for example, records show that 50 inches of rain fell in one month's time.

"And if it rained that much there, you can only imagine how much it rained here," Wulf said.

Wulf points to other winters as testament that flooding is an ever-present hazard. The rains of 1911 flooded sections of downtown San Jose and Willow Glen. First and Santa Clara streets were a virtual lake in 1925. In 1955, the Lexington Reservoir in Los Gatos came dangerously close to overflowing.

A 1987 article in the Journal of Geophysical Research states that scientists did not know of the El Niño phenomenon until the 1950s but that conditions similar to those found during an El Niño storm, such as extremely stormy conditions in Peru, did exist in 1911 and 1925.

According to the San Jose Historical Museum Association, more than 5.5 inches of rain fell during the second week of March 1911. As the Guadalupe River spilled its contents onto city streets, several bridges collapsed. And public transportation halted when several train lines became submerged.

Sound familiar?

"The ground in Santa Clara Valley is incredibly soft. All the soil around here is pure soil with no rocks. And with artesian wells underground, when it rains, the water has nowhere to go," Wulf said.

Humans, of course, have tried to control the water. Los Gatos Creek, which originally ended in a lake of sorts in Willow Glen, has had different courses throughout the years due to farmers trying to direct its path.

But Mother Nature shows she's boss year after year. And Wulf doesn't seem surprised by the annual threat of flooding. He has a tendency to compare every winter season with the floods of 1862.

Wulf has researched that winter and other disastrous storms for 30 years. He worked closely with San Jose historian and author Clyde Arbuckle, who recently passed away.

"I just want people to know that the whole valley flooded at one time, and it could happen again," Wulf said.

[ Back to Contents Page | Willow Glen Resident Home Page | Archives ]