The Evening News. October 7, 1916.

13. The House Of Don Jose.

Within a radius of ten miles of San Jose, of all the great ranches of the Dons, the adobe of San Jose alone stands unshaken. Nearly a hundred years have passed since Don Jose, weary of the excitement of military service in San Jose, Monterey and San Francisco, politely hinted to the Governor that he thought he had carried repose and retirement to a quiet spot in the country.

The governor agreed with the Don. He also added that perhaps his most Christian majesty would give His most faithful servant, Don Jose, a little patch of land for a garden. Not one garden, but several gardens the king gave to Don Jose. As its name hints, these little gardens were the beginning of Milpitas.

Don Jose's little gardens occupied many thousand acres. Soon in a cup of sunshine formed by the gold-brown Piedmont hills the Indians began molding the black earth into Don Jose's adobe that I saw the other day. The Don had no desire to withdrawal from the public thoroughfare. His house stands square on the highway.

The morning sun beat on the creamy old adobe and its tall, scraggly, hard scarlet geraniums when we arrived. No longer had the adobe a tiled roof. A second story of wood, shingled, gabled, and a balcony buttressed by hewn columns have been added. The faded, green, shuttered closed doors seemed to have the habit of hospitality. We expected them to open and welcome us. We forgot that the Don had been long from home. Only some stray yellowed chickens showed that the house was inhabited.

We passed to the left of the adobe where we met a small black-eyed boy munching a hard mission pair, that had fallen from a dilapidated seedling, doubtless the offspring of the trees planted by the Don. Some huge fig trees laden with brown, bursting ripe fruit were in the rear of the house. A million flies were devouring a heap of refuse near the tree. In the midst of the refuse stood a youngish, unkempt woman with deep, dusky, wandering eyes. When we asked to see the house she, bewildered, twisted her red print apron and fled. Thus rebuffed we turned backward.

In the front of the house we met the husband, a tall young Portuguese.

"You want to buy?"

"No, we want to see the old house."

He understood. "House very old." "How old?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said.

"Who lived here?"

"I don't know," he answered with a shrug as he opened the shuttered front doors for us to enter what we knew had been the Don's hall.

The Don's hall was about twenty-five feet square. Its green blue painted ceiling screamed at us. Its torn magenta wall paper struck us in the face. Half the paper had been pulled from one side of the room showing the welcome pure, white plaster as it looked in the Don's days.

In one corner of the hall was a bicycle. In another was a little shrine, it's tawdry tinsel touchingly symbolizing the upward striving of souls. There were no windows in the Don's hall. Narrow double entrance doors were set deep in the thick chill walls, and the doors opposite led into what once had been the patio. In this high, windowless room it was clear that the Don either wished to shut out the hills and valleys, or he avoided windows through which highwaymen or Indians might force an entrance.

We went into the other large rooms at each end of the hall. In the Don's diningroom had been feasts a week long. Now the room was filled with rubbish. In the room balancing this where the Don had slept were the Portuguese family beds.

From the bedroom we climbed narrow stairs, solid as the day they were built. Not a crack was in the walls. We passed through the three bedrooms on the upper floor. We opened the French doors and stepped out on the old balcony. Invisible tinkling serenades seems to float from below. As far as we could see in the sunny valley and behind in the hills, all had been the Don's domain.

"How many acres in the ranch now?" I asked the Portuguese.

Twenty. I pay one hundred and seventy dollars rent for house and land."

"Who owns it?"

"I don't know. I pay agent."

We drove away past a ruin of an older adobe a few rods farther down the road on the Don's ranch. We went back to look at the tottering, gaping wreck. There were no windows nor doors in the house. Recently it had been used as a stable. On the floor still was the refuse from the horses. On the walls were posters of Barnum and Bailey's circus.

As we went back to San Jose we passed fertile orchards growing on what once had been the Don's estate. I wondered intensely what had been the occupation in the Don's old adobe, the joys, the hopes, the habit of life.

We passed along Penetencia creek where the priests of Santa Clara used to meet the priests of the Mission San Jose, there under the silver and green sycamore to confess their pale sins. All the way I tried to recreate the existence of Don Jose and his family.

So strange and so romantic is life that that very afternoon by chance I met the only living being born in the old adobe, and who knew what had there happened.

She was the daughter of Don Jose.

[Transcribers note: Don Jose Maria Alviso]

Transcribed by Claire Martin, for the Santa Clara Co. CAGenWeb Project. 2007

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