The 1905 J. Gilbert Smith House reveals what life was like before the region became Silicon Valley
In 1901, when he was 25 years old, Smith bought five acres along the unpaved two-lane Giffin Road, “a little dirt lane” that snaked all the way from El Camino Real up to La Honda. Now called San Antonio Road, it was then used for redwood logging. Gilbert Smith pitched a tent on his property — “amidst the owl clover and California poppies” — while building a house and tank tower. Those structures still stand today, having survived one of the area’s worst earthquakes in 1906.
The cozy Smith bungalow is now a permanent historical exhibit at Los Altos History Museum. The Los Altos Heritage Orchard right by the museum is the oldest city-owned heritage orchard left in the Bay Area. Planted in 1901 by Smith, it was sold to the newly incorporated city of Los Altos in 1954 when architect Frank Lloyd Wright “urged city officials to incorporate the orchard in their design,” according to Robin Chapman’s book titled “California Apricots: The Lost Orchards of Silicon Valley.”
If time travel were possible and you were zapped back more than a hundred years into the past in the Santa Clara Valley, chances are you may be on a train rolling into a commuter stop called Los Altos Depot. As your train barrels into the station, you may spot young men on bicycles going to work at a nearby fruit cannery, their lunch packs dangling from the handlebar. Just a 10 minute walk eastward from the station you’ll spot a Craftsman style house nestled in the middle of a sprawling apricot farm, designed and constructed by a carpenter called J. Gilbert Smith.
Outside the Smith House you can see a palm that is supposedly a cousin of the trees that adorn Stanford University’s Palm Drive. Decorated and populated as a Depression-era residence, the Smith House is filled with many nostalgic...more.
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