#5: Agriculture's erosion: W.W. II began a shift to industry
BY WILLYS PECK
Mercury News Staff Writer
World War II brought dark days
to then-small-town San
Jose and the semirural
Santa Clara Valley. Early
1942 also brought nighttime
blackouts as war fever swept through
the South Bay, where rumors
flew about scouting enemy
bombers and submarines lurking
off the nearby coast.
Nobody knew it at the time,
but World War II
spelled the beginning of the
end of the historic dominance of
agriculture in the region and
the eventual
replacement of the ``Valley
of Heart's Delight'' with the term
Silicon Valley.
And nobody knew it at the time,
but where there were
orchards of trees in the opening
days of World War
II there would be -- in just
two quick generations -- homes,
electronics plants, high-tech
industry and an urban
spaghetti of freeways.
World War II was responsible
for ``setting up the
framework for development of
Silicon Valley,''
said David Eakins, emeritus
professor of history at San Jose
State University.
But the end of the agricultural
age came about
``through the kind of development
that San Jose underwent,'' he
said. ``It was not basically
industrial; it was housing.''
Trees were bulldozed to make
way for housing needed by
battalions of servicemen and
civilians who got a
taste of the benefits -- the
less intrinsic fruits -- offered
by Santa Clara Valley while
they passed through on their way to war.
Impressed by the region's attractions
-- warm
weather and wide-open land
-- many acted on their resolve to
return to the valley after
the war.
And return they did. The population,
which included
industrial workers, many who
commuted to Bay Area
shipyards, streamed back into
the valley. The
entire region felt the impact
from bases like Moffett
Field in Mountain View and
Camp Roberts, near Paso
Robles.
The numbers are telling. During
the 1930s, Santa
Clara County's population increased
by just more than 29,000, to
about 175,000. In the 1940s,
however, the increase was about
116,000, or four times as much,
with the total population just less
than 300,000.
But as the end of the war triggered
the arrival of
thousands of new residents,
the advent of war was a catalyst for
industries that, up to then,
had served mostly to meet the needs of
farmers and food processors.
Companies like today's FMC Corp. could
be called a microcosm of that
change.
As described in Clyde Arbuckle's
comprehensive
``History of San Jose,'' the
firm had its origins
as the Bean Spray Pump Co.
of the 1880s, which manufactured
rigs used in combating
insects and scale on orchard trees. A
similar business, Anderson
Barngrover Co., manufactured prune
dippers and branched out into
the production of
fruit-processing machinery.
In 1928, these two firms merged
to form Food Machinery
Corp. But later, with war on
the horizon, its plant shifted
focus from agricultural hardware
to production of tanks for
U.S. armored divisions. Many
years later, FMC Corp., still
producing military hardware,
built the Bradley Fighting
Vehicle, used in Operation
Desert Storm in 1992.
In the same league as FMC Corp.
was the Joshua
Hendy Iron Works, which opened
in Sunnyvale in 1907.
In 1912, the company produced
such items as San Jose's ornate
electroliers
-- the lampposts that
graced First and Market
streets. When World War II
hit, however, the
factory was re-equipped to
turn out huge steam
engines that powered Liberty
ships in their vital
role of transporting men and
materiel.
But the industrial metamorphosis,
while healthy
for area-wide economic growth,
came at a cost
to the orchards and canneries
that once supported
the valley.
At the turn of the past century,
prunes, cherries and
scrumptious golden apricots
were the bounty that
filled valley orchards. And
even up until the 1960s,
the county dominated this field.
But soon after,
according to Yvonne Jacobson's
``Passing Farms:
Enduring Values,'' the orchards
started to decline
and the canneries and packinghouses
began to
disappear.
As many can attest, the numbers reflect the reality.
In 1940, before the population
explosion, the annual
harvested acreage of fruits
and nuts in Santa Clara
County was 106,115. In
1998, it was 4,515.
After the war, one dominant
crop, apricots, showed
a dramatic drop in terms of
acreage. In
1940, the county had 18,584
acres of apricot
trees. That number dropped
to 5,125 by 1970. By
1998, there were only 500 acres
of apricot trees left.
In terms of its suitability
for agriculture, the
Santa Clara Valley had -- and
still has -- the
resources to be the world's
leading producer of
canned fresh fruit and processed
dried fruit, a
distinction it once proudly
held.
But, sadly, a symbolic completion
of the
industrial transformation came
just over a week ago
when San Jose bade farewell
to Del Monte -- the
area's last major cannery,
which opened in 1917.
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