An Online Resource Guide to Santa Clara County Historical Archives

The San Jose Public Library serves as a clearinghouse where one can explore the many different local histories that make up this area. Its comprehensive list of Santa Clara County history organizations provides links to local historical societies and city museums. Santa Clara City Library’s roster of county history resources is similarly indispensable.

The Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies, based at San Jose State University, honors California’s largest and most enduring literary lion, the Nobel laureate John Steinbeck. The author of The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and East of Eden (1952), Steinbeck’s grave is 60 miles away in Salinas. Worldwide fame didn’t necessarily make him a popular man—Steinbeck’s sympathy for the farmworkers, and his life-and-death subject matter aggravated churchly, conservative readers. But his The Long Valley, a collection of short stories, is one of the most evocative books written about life in California’s rural towns, before the semiconductor was invented, and the world rushed in.

Among the San Jose library system’s nearly two dozen branches is the Martin Luther King Jr. Library, a combined SJSU/main library campus downtown. It’s an eight-story building containing a highly important resource on the history of the valley, the California Room. Its physical resources are non-circulating, but there’s a trove of digital material available online.

New Almaden—a small mining town recalled in Wallace Stegner’s novel Angle of Repose—is named after a Spanish city where mercury was mined. Mercury extracted here in the 1850s was used to purify gold during the California Gold Rush. (The toxicity of this boiling method can’t be exaggerated; two centuries after the rush ended, San Francisco bay fish still have elevated levels of mercury from the runoff.) The quiet little town of New Almaden still stands, surprisingly tranquil given its proximity to a vast megalopolis. It’s much as it was 170 years ago, with a museum of mining and nearby hiking. The Almaden Quicksilver County Park website offers information on the mine and the various trails.

Japanese laborers made the long journey to the West Coast from the 1860s until nativist sentiment in the 1920s halted the migration. (The Four Immigrants manga, circa 1930, told of Japanese brothers who settled in the Sacramento Delta; it’s one of the first autobiographical graphic novels.) Japanese-American history—particularly the history of San Jose’s attractive and long-settled Japantown—is commemorated at this museum. There is evidence of tragedies: litanies of discrimination, and the rounding up of these citizens into camps during World War II. But there are triumphs: one local internee named Norm Mineta became a cabinet member in both the George W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations, and lived to see the bustling San Jose airport named after him. Stories of other community members can be heard on the museum’s website, part of the Manabu: Oral History Project.

San Jose’s Chinatown was burned down in a race riot during the 1880s but this Stanford University-based site studies the since-paved area for artifacts.

This National Park Service site rosters the historical sites of Santa Clara County, including the magnificent, infamous Winchester Mystery House--ghosts or no ghosts, it’s a stunning architectural achievement. Also listed is the glorious Villa Montalvo, which was the gilded age mansion of Senator James Phelan, and the modernist Palo Alto mansion where Herbert Hoover lived. Hoover learned he’d won the 1928 election while he was in residence.

History San Jose is the city’s historical nexus. Its campus is nearby the zoo at Kelley Park. It’s also adjacent to 75-year-old Municipal Park baseball stadium, home of the San Jose Giants: for these many years, the terror of the California League. History San Jose’s “History Park” has relocated surviving frontier buildings to give a sense of the scale of the old days in Santa Clara County. There’s also a half-scale replica of the one-time wonder of the area: the Moonlight Tower, which was 237 feet tall, with flagpole. Dangling six arc lights at 24,000 candlepower, this Victorian-age technological advance endured more than 30 years, until it was knocked over by a freak storm right before World War I. Tom Wohlmut’s documentary The Light Between Two Towers uncovered evidence that this derrick-like marvel may have been an influence on Gustav Eiffel’s much-better-known tower in Paris. History San Jose is working to get all its archives online; right now, history fans can find more than 40,000 records from its catalog online.