San Jose History Facts and Timeline

(San Jose, California - CA, USA)

California's third-largest city, San Jose has been providing support to the Bay Area since the late 1700s. After 200 years of prosperous agricultural output, the modern history of San Jose was shaped by the arrival of computers and information technology.

Today, the hub of Silicon Valley is an important counterpart to its larger neighbor, San Francisco, just to the north.

Early Colonization

The city's history really began in 1777, when it became known as the Pueblo de San Jose de Guadalupe. This was the first settlement established by the Spanish for their new colony of Nueva California, which was a major presence in the region. Mission Santa Clara and Mission San Jose were built shortly after to serve the religious needs of the Spanish colonists, and to attempt to convert the local Ohlone Native Americans to Catholicism.

Supporting Role

In the early years, San Jose served as a center of agricultural production for the nearby Spanish military outposts at San Francisco and Monterey. The original town center can be visited at the Plaza de Cesar Chavez, in the heart of downtown, although little of its original form remains. The small community of San Jose continued farming for the next 150 years, until San Francisco finally outgrew itself and needed room to expand.

A City is Born

San Jose's history has been shaped primarily by its proximity to San Francisco and its fertile land. In the 1920s, there were so many orchards in the area that it earned the nickname of the 'Valley of Heart's Delight'. The town and the surrounding Santa Clara Valley made up the largest swath of undeveloped land near San Francisco, and when the soldiers returned from WWII, an aggressive urban expansion began in the 1950s and the 1960s that continues to this day.

Silicon Valley's CPU

In addition to its role as a residential overflow for San Francisco, San Jose began to write its own history when the first high tech companies moved in. IBM appeared on the scene in 1943, basing its western US headquarters in San Jose. Disc drives were invented here in 1962, an event which was followed quickly by the creation of other technological marvels that have largely created the modern computing world we live in today.

During this period, the old orchards were paved over and Silicon Valley was born. Today, dozens of well-known global tech companies are based here and provide the bulk of the city's economy. San Jose's proximity to San Francisco makes it an appealing and slightly cheaper place to live. The Tech Museum and the San Jose Museum of Art are two downtown venues that showcase the two very different major chapters in the city's long history.