Visit Milpitas, California Places

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The Walkfo guide to things to do & explore in Milpitas, California

  

Milpitas, California Places Overview: History, Culture & Facts about Milpitas, California

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Milpitas, California history

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Milpitas was first inhabited by the Tamyen (also spelled Thomien, Tamien, Thamien, or Tamiayn), a linguistic subgroup of the Muwekma Ohlone people who had resided in the San Francisco Bay Area for thousands of years. The Ohlone Indians lived a traditional life based on everyday hunting and gathering. Some of the Ohlone lived in various villages within what is now Milpitas, including sites underneath what are now the Calvary Assembly of God Church and Higuera Adobe Park. Archaeological evidence gathered from Ohlone graves at the Elmwood Correctional Facility in 1993 revealed a rich trade with other tribes from Sacramento to Monterey. During the Spanish expeditions of the late 18th century, several missions were founded in the San Francisco Bay Area. During the mission period, Milpitas served as a crossroads between Mission San José de Guadalupe in present-day Fremont and Mission Santa Clara de Asis in present-day Santa Clara. The land of modern-day Milpitas was divided between the 6,353-acre (25.71 km) Rancho Rincon de Los Esteros (Spanish for “corner of the wetlands”) granted to Ignacio Alviso; the 4,457.8-acre (18.040 km) Rancho Milpitas (Spanish for “little corn fields”) granted to José María Alviso; and the 4,394.35-acre (17.7833 km) Rancho Los Tularcitos (Spanish for “little tule marshes”) granted to José Higuera. Jose Maria Alviso was the son of Francisco Xavier Alviso and Maria Bojorquez, both of whom arrived in San Francisco as children with the de Anza Expedition. José María Alviso is considered to be the founder of Milpitas. Due to Jose Maria Alviso’s descendants’ difficulty securing his claims to the Rancho Milpitas property, portions of his land were either swindled from the Alviso family or were sold to American settlers to pay for legal fees. Both landowners had built prominent adobe homes on their properties. Today, both adobes still exist and are the oldest structures in Milpitas. The seriously eroded walls of the Jose Higuera Adobe, now in Higuera Adobe Park, are encapsulated in a brick shell built c.1970 by Marian Weller, a descendant of pioneer Joseph Weller. The Alviso Adobe can be seen mostly in its original form with one kitchen addition made by the Cuciz family after they purchased the adobe from the Gleason family in 1922. Prior to the city acquiring the Alviso Adobe in 1995, it was the oldest continuously occupied adobe house in California dating from the Mexican period and today is still gradually being restored and undergoing seismic upgrades by the City of Milpitas. Alviso Adobe History Park is to be opened, after the exterior restoration of the adobe and outbuildings is completed, as an educational museum with historic items, trees, buildings, and documents. In the 1850s, large numbers of Americans of English, German, and Irish descent arrived to farm the fertile lands of Milpitas. The Burnett, Rose, Dempsey, Jacklin, Trimble, Ayer, Parks, Wool, Weller, Minnis, and Evans families are among the early settlers of Milpitas. (Today many schools, streets, and parks have been named in honor of these families.) These early settlers farmed the land that was once the ranchos. Some set up businesses on what was then called Mission Road (now called Main Street) between Calaveras Road (now called Carlo Street) and the Alviso-Milpitas Road (now called Serra Way). By the late 20th century this area became known as the “Midtown” district. Yet another influx of immigration came in the 1870s and 1880s as Portuguese sharecroppers from the Azores came to farm the Milpitas hillsides. Many of the Azoreans had such locally well-known surnames as Coelho, Covo, Mattos, Nunes, Spangler, Serpa, and Silva. There is a local legend that in 1857, when the U.S. Postal Service wanted to locate a Post Office in Frederick Creighton’s store near the intersection of Mission Road and Alviso-Milpitas Road to serve the newly created Township, there was some support for naming it Penitencia, after the small Roman Catholic confessional building that had served local Indians and ranchers and had once stood several miles south of the village near Penitencia Creek which ran just west of the Mission Road. A local farmer and first Assistant Postmaster, Joseph Weller, felt the Spanish word Penitencia might be confused with the English word “penitentiary.” Instead of choosing Penitencia, he suggested another popular name for the area, Milpitas, after the name of Alviso’s property, Rancho Milpitas. Thus was born “Milpitas Township.” For over a century, Milpitas served as a popular rest stop for travelers on the old Oakland−San Jose Highway. At the north side of the intersection of that road with the Milpitas-Alviso Road, for many years stood “French’s Hotel” that had been originally built by Alex Anderson prior to 1859, when Alfred French bought it from Austin M. Thompson. South of the site of French’s Hotel, was a saloon dating from at least 1856 when Agustus Rathbone purchased the land and “improvements” from Richard Greenham. The first murder in Milpitas was committed in the early 1860s in “Rathbone’s Saloon” (alas, the murderer escaped). Later the saloon was replaced by a hotel that is shown on the 1893 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map as “Goodwin’s Hotel” (perhaps the same Henry K. Goodwin who, in 1890, loaned money to prominent local rancher Marshall Pomeroy). Presumably, this hotel burned down and “Smith’s Corner,” which still stands, was built in 1895, by John Smith, as a saloon that served beer and wine to thirsty travelers for a century before becoming a restaurant in 2001. Around this central core, grocery and dry goods stores, blacksmithies, service stations, and, in the 1920s, one of America’s earliest “fast food” chain restaurants, “The Fat Boy”, opened nearby. Another of Milpitas’ most popular restaurants was the “Kozy Kitchen” established in 1940 by the Carlo family in the former “Central Market” building. Kozy Kitchen was demolished soon after Jimmy Carlo sold the restaurant in 1999. Even in the early 1950s, Milpitas served a farming community of 800 people who walked a mere one or two blocks to work. On January 26, 1954, faced with getting swallowed up by a rapidly expanding San Jose, Milpitas residents incorporated as a city that included the recently built Ford Auto Assembly plant. When San Jose attempted to annex Milpitas barely seven years later, the “Milpitas Minutemen” were quickly organized to oppose annexation and keep Milpitas independent. An overwhelming majority of Milpitas registered voters voted “No” to annexation in the 1961 election as a result of a vigorous anti-annexation campaign. Following the election, the anti-annexation committee, who had compared themselves to the Revolutionary War Minutemen who fought the British on Lexington Green—a role filled in this case by the neighboring city of San Jose – adopted the image of Daniel Chester French’s Minuteman statue, that stands near the site of the Old North Bridge in Concord, MA, as part of the official city seal. In the 1960s, the city approved the construction of the Calaveras overpass. Formerly at a junction with the Union Pacific railroad, Calaveras Boulevard had a bridge passing over six sets of railroad tracks after the construction was completed. Though the result was that local residents could now drive over the train tracks without waiting for a slow freight to pass, it resulted in the loss of the historical residential area. Here houses owned by city leaders had to be purchased by the city at full market value and either moved or demolished. Starting in 1955, with the construction of the Ford Motor Assembly Plant, and accelerating in the 1960s and 1970s, extensive residential and retail development took place. Hayfields in Milpitas rapidly disappeared as industries and residential housing developments spread. Soon, the once rural town of Milpitas found itself a San Jose suburb. The population jumped from about 800 in 1950 to 62,698 in 2000. Several local farmers and businessmen who had chipped in from $2 to $50 to file for incorporation, had become millionaires within ten years. Most of them then moved away. According to the book The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein (2017), when the Ford plant moved from Richmond to Milpitas in 1953, the town incorporated in order to pass laws that would exclude African American workers from residing there. “Union leaders met with Ford Executives and negotiated an agreement permitting all 1400 Richmond plant workers, including the approximately 250 African Americans, to transfer to the new facility. Once Ford’s plans became known, Milpitas residents incorporated the town and passed an emergency ordinance permitting the newly installed city council to ban apartment construction and allow only single family homes…. The Federal Housing Administration approved subdivision plans that met their specifications in Milpitas and guaranteed mortgages to qualified buyers….One of the specifications for mortgages insured in Milpitas (as in the rest of the country at that time) was an openly stated prohibition on sales to African Americans. Because Milpitas had no apartments, and houses in the area were off-limits to black workers-though their incomes and economic circumstances were like those of whites on the assembly line-African Americans had to choose between giving up the good industrial jobs, moving to apartments in a segregated neighborhood of San Jose, or enduring lengthy commutes between North Richmond and Milpitas. In 1961, Ben F. Gross, a civil rights activist, became Milpitas’ first black city councilman with the backing of the UAW. This election was recognized nationally and received attention from Look and Life magazines. In 1966, Ben F. Gross became California’s first black mayor when he was elected by the city’s residents and “the only black mayor of a predominantly white town in California”. Mayor Gross was reelected in 1968 and continued fighting against Milpitas’ annexation by San Jose. The Ford San Jose Assembly Plant closed in 1984, later being converted into a shopping mall, known as The Great Mall of the Bay Area, which opened in 1994. In the early 21st century, the Milpitas light rail transit system station was added, making it the northeasternmost light rail destination in the region. On January 26, 2004, the city celebrated the 50th anniversary of its incorporation and issued the book Milpitas: Five Dynamic Decades to commemorate 50 years of Milpitas’ history as a busy, exciting crossroads community.

Etymology

Milpitas is the plural diminutive of milpa, Mexican Spanish for “cornfield” The name means “Place of little cornfields” The word milpa is derived from the Nahuatl words milli, meaning “agricultural field” and pan, meaning on. The name Milpas may have meant that there had been small Native American gardens nearby.

Milpitas, California economy & business

Top employers

According to the City’s 2020 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, the city’s top employers in the city are: The top employers are:: The city’s largest city-based employers: The City of York City, the largest city in the country, the most-growing city in history.

Milpitas, California geography / climate

Milpitas lies in the northeastern corner of the Santa Clara Valley, which is south of San Francisco. The median elevation of the city is 19 feet (6 m) and the western area is almost at sea level. The highest point in the southeastern foothills is a 1,289-foot (393 m) peak.

Urban layout

Milpitas is divided into three sections by Interstates 680 and 880. To the west of I-880 is a largely industrial and commercial area to the west. The oldest part of the city is the “Midtown” area, the oldest part, has few remaining historic residences.

Pollution

Milpitas occasionally experiences odorous air traveling downwind from bay salt marshes, from the Newby Island landfill, and from the anaerobic digestion facility at Zero Waste Energy Development Company. Local creeks and the nearby San Francisco Bay suffer somewhat from water pollution from street water runoff and industrial wastes.

Climate

Milpitas enjoys warm, sunny weather with few extreme temperatures. Summer is dry and warm but not hot like in other parts the Bay Area. Temperatures infrequently reach over 100 °F (38 °C)

You can visit Milpitas, California places with Walkfo Milpitas, California to hear history at Milpitas, California’s places whilst walking around using the free digital tour app. Walkfo Milpitas, California has 5 places to visit in our interactive Milpitas, California map, with amazing history, culture & travel facts you can explore the same way you would at a museum or art gallery with information audio headset. With Walkfo, you can travel by foot, bike or bus throughout Milpitas, California, being in the moment, without digital distraction or limits to a specific walking route. Our historic audio walks, National Trust interactive audio experiences, digital tour guides for English Heritage locations are available at Milpitas, California places, with a AI tour guide to help you get the best from a visit to Milpitas, California & the surrounding areas.

“Curated content for millions of locations across the UK, with 5 audio facts unique to Milpitas, California places in an interactive Milpitas, California map you can explore.”

Walkfo: Visit Milpitas, California Places Map
5 tourist, history, culture & geography spots

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Walkfo Milpitas, California tourism map key: places to see & visit like National Trust sites, Blue Plaques, English Heritage locations & top tourist destinations in Milpitas, California

  

Best Milpitas, California places to visit

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Milpitas, California has places to explore by foot, bike or bus. Below are a selection of the varied Milpitas, California’s destinations you can visit with additional content available at the Walkfo Milpitas, California’s information audio spots:

JDSU In August 2015, JDSU split into two different companies: Viavi Solutions and Lumentum Holdings. It was formerly known as JDS Uniphase, prior to a rebranding of its corporate image.

Rancho Rincón de los Esteros Rancho Rincón de los Esteros was a 6,353-acre (25.71 km) Mexican land grant in present-day Santa Clara County, California. It was given by Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado in 1838 to Ignacio Alviso. The rancho was located on the southern shore of San Francisco Bay.

El Torito El Torito (Spanish for “the little bull”) is a Mexican restaurant chain, consisting of 69 restaurants. Some of the restaurants are located in Oregon, Arizona, and overseas. The chain claims to be a pioneer in the California full service Mexican casual dining restaurant segment.

SanDisk SanDisk is Western Digital’s brand for flash memory products, including memory cards and readers, USB flash drives, and solid-state drives. The company was acquired by Western Digital in 2016. As of March 2019, Western Digital is the fourth-largest manufacturer of flash memory.

Visit Milpitas, California plaques