"If time travel were possible and you were zapped back more than a hundred years into the past in the Santa Clara Valley, chances are you may be on a train rolling into a commuter stop called Los Altos Depot. As your train barrels into the station, you may spot young men on bicycles going to work at a nearby fruit cannery, their lunch packs dangling from the handlebar."
"Just a 10 minute walk eastward from the station you'll spot a Craftsman style house nestled in the middle of a sprawling apricot farm, designed and constructed by a carpenter called J. Gilbert Smith. In 1901, when he was 25 years old, Smith bought five acres along the unpaved two-lane Giffin Road, a little dirt lane that snaked all the way from El Camino Real up to La Honda."
J. Gilbert Smith purchased five acres in 1901 and built a Craftsman house and tank tower while living in a tent amid native wildflowers. The Smith House and adjacent apricot orchard survived the 1906 earthquake and remain intact. The bungalow now serves as a permanent exhibit at the Los Altos History Museum. The Los Altos Heritage Orchard, planted in 1901, is the oldest city-owned heritage orchard in the Bay Area and was sold to the city in 1954 after Frank Lloyd Wright urged its incorporation. Smith used redwood costing $15 per 1,000 square feet and left unfinished porch trunks that evoke the forest, with a palm outside related to the trees on Stanford's Palm Drive. The house is presented as a Depression-era residence filled with nostalgic period elements.
Read at www.mercurynews.com
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