For nearly two centuries San Jose was a farm town. Blooming fruit trees covered the valley floor and the air smelled of ripening fruit, which gave the Santa Clara Valley its nickname, the Valley of Heart’s Delight. Prunes were the great crop: by 1900 the valley grew most of California’s prunes. Until the 1960s it was described as the largest fruit-producing and packing region in the world, with 39 canneries.
The Del Monte cannery in Midtown was long the city’s largest employer, and in 1922 the D’Arrigo brothers started the first commercial broccoli farming in the United States in San Jose. By the 1970s most of the orchards had been built over and the Valley of Heart’s Delight had become Silicon Valley.