ALAMEDA COUNTY Transcribed by: Linda Jackson 5/20/2008
The Ideal Place for Your California Home
by Henry Anderson Lafler
ITS GOOD ROADS ARE THE PRIDE OF ALAMEDA COUNTY--THEY
ARE AMONG THE BEST IN THE WORLD. THIS IS
A SCENE IN LIVERMORE VALLEY.
MISSION
SAN JOSE, ESTABLISHED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF
FATHER JUNIPERO SERRA BY FATHER FIRMIN DE LASUEN,
JUNE ELEVEN, SEVENTEEN NINETY-SEVEN.
CENTURY
OLD PALMS PLANTED BY THE MISSION FATHERS AT
PALMDALE, NEAR MISSION SAN JOSE.
With unerring sense the mission fathers chose the most beautiful and well-watered spots for their missions. Some spiritual prescience seemed to guide them to the sunny slopes of well-watered hills, where springs never fail and frosts never come.
Such a spot as this naturally is one of the places that allure the seeker for the Ideal Home. And here, indeed, you may find such an one.
Enter the gates of Palmdale, in the little town called Mission San Jose, and you are in fairyland. Imagine all the beautiful trees and shrubs of the sub-tropics and north temperate zone gathered together, and every one a perfect specimen of its kind. Imagine avenues of palms as tall as pines--palms planted by the mission fathers. Imagine fruits of every conceivable variety. Here, long rows of grapes, purple and white; there, almond and walnut trees, with spreading branches; a few steps further and you pass beneath the branches of giant fig trees, weighted down with purple fruit; a turnstile in the hedge brings you to a little orchard, where branches of the dark green trees bend to the ground with their weight of oranges. Beyond, yellow lemons grow luxuriantly. Berries of all sorts; the alligator pear; the loquot; the persimmon; all the southern and northern fruits here grow together.
A PICTURESQUE OLD "ADOBE" RELIC OF THE SPANISH REGIME
IN ALAMEDA COUNTY
And as for flowers, in the dusky reaches of the ever-living stream are great masses of pale calla lilies; roses brighten the green lawns; great sheaves of cannas, ten feet high, are massed near the dwelling, over which clamber purple-flowered vines. Nowhere in the world may the man who loves beautiful gardens and takes delight in the profusion and variety of tree and vine find such a garden spot in which to plant his dwelling, as here on the warm southwestern slopes of the Alameda County hills.
A mile away from Mission San Jose, another estate, known as Warm Springs, adds to a similar luxuriance of flower, fruit and foliage, a series of lily-laden pools, connected by a thread of water which issues from the hillside above and which maintains, winter and summer, a temperature above blood heat. Another mile and the visitor may see traces of the early Spanish civilization in the county when the Amadors, the Pachecos, the Alvisos, and Peraltas counted their cattle by the thousands, and when wild oats grew on the level plain as high as a horse. An old adobe, its walls three feet thick, stands by the roadside, mute evidence of different, and perhaps more romantic, times. From near its walls stretches a great hedge of giant cactus, twenty feet high, once an effective barrier to Indian attacks.
The smiling land--plain and hollow--not only offers a climate that is matchless, no matter where in the world you seek, but a special flavor of romantic times, of a picturesque civilization that has all but vanished.
GATHERING WILD POPPIES
ALAMEDA
COUNTY IS NOTED FOR ITS CHURCHES--THIS ONE
IN ALAMEDA IS EMBOWERED IN GREENERY
ALL THE YEAR AROUND