San Jose California History

Long before the Spanish first arrived in the Santa Clara Valley, the Ohlone Indians lived in small, semi-permanent villages from Monterey to Marin County. They harvested foodstuffs such as acorns and seeds, hunted local game and fish and traded their clamshell beads for obsidian and other goods.

The first European explorers arrived in 1769, but it wasn't until 1777 that Joaquin Moraga founded El Pueblo de San Jose de Guadalupe (Town of St. Joseph on the Wolf River) as a farming community to supply the nearby military installations, making San Jose the oldest civil settlement in California.

During the Bear Flag Revolt in 1846, Captain Thomas Fallon captured San Jose without bloodshed and raised the American flag. During the Gold Rush, New Almaden Mines south of San Jose supplied the mercury essential to separate gold from its ore. When California became a state in 1850, San Jose was its first incorporated city, and it served as state capitol until 1852.

San Jose was an agricultural center until the 1960s, when city manager A. P. "Dutch" Hamann implemented an aggressive growth program. Orchards and farms became housing developments as the population grew almost tenfold in less than 20 years, reaching 495,000 in 1969. By the 1990s, the former bedroom community was calling itself the Capital of Silicon Valley. As the electronics industry boomed, San Jose swelled to 800,000 by 1990, and in 2004, it overtook Detroit as the country's tenth-largest city. Today, San Jose is home to 25 companies with 1,000 or more employees, including Adobe Systems, Cisco Systems and eBay.