California Apricots by Robin Chapman

Author:Robin Chapman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2013-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

A vintage postcard of Stanford University, founded in 1891. Tuition there was free until the 1930s. Author’s collection.

Their youngest son, J. Gilbert Smith, born in 1876, became a carpenter and worked on new dormitory buildings at Stanford, often commuting to and from Palo Alto on his bicycle. His work helped his older brother Harlon and his sister Eleanor get their Stanford degrees. Thankful to the end of his life, Harlon Smith, a Santa Cruz educator, named his own son Gilbert.

By the time he was twenty-five, Gilbert Smith had aided his siblings and even spent a year at Stanford himself. But, he decided there were other opportunities that interested him.

In 1901, he bought five acres on what was then Giffin Road, a “little dirt lane” as he later called it, which had once gone all the way from El Camino Real up to La Honda when it was used as a road for redwood logging. Giffin later became San Antonio Road. “The following year, I had planted five acres in apricots and had started construction on my home,” Smith told an interviewer in 1957.

The weather in the valley was so mild that Smith pitched a tent amidst the owl clover and California poppies and lived there while he built his house, which took until 1905 to complete. The square, two-story farmhouse was covered with redwood shingles and had a porch that wrapped around three sides. It had a windmill in the back and a water tower—though Smith said the windmill was knocked over in the 1906 earthquake. Along the way, Smith also acquired another five acres of land and planted that land in apricots, too. As Smith worked to nurture his orchard, he spent long hours on his house. He installed a masonry fireplace and used local redwood for the staircase and to panel some of the downstairs walls. He constructed part of the porch for use as a pantry and made another part into his office. He designed the kitchen so the boxes used for collecting fruit in the orchards would fit right into the kitchen cabinets as storage bins.

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