Saratoga History
It’s not difficult to see past the suburban paradise of 21st-century Saratoga and into the humble origins of its past; all you have to do is take a stroll through downtown and head west into the hills.
It is in the hills where a few pioneers interested in taking advantage of its wooded setting put down roots. In 1848, William Campbell built the first sawmill in the area at a location approximately two miles from downtown. Campbell also lent his name to the embryonic town. For several years, the municipality was known as “Campbell’s Gap,” one of the many names it went by before being christened Saratoga.
In 1850, Campbell leased his mill to Martin McCarty, who built a road leading up into the mountains from what eventually became downtown Saratoga. McCarty charged users of his road a toll; hence, the name of the settlement eventually evolved from “Campbell’s Gap” to “Tollgate.”
Tollgate (McCartysville, or Bank Mills, as Saratoga, was later known) was a thriving lumber town for the next half-century. The town centered along Big Basin Way, which at the time was unimaginatively called “Lumber Street,” grew quickly, adding commercial businesses that weren’t always standards of clean living. In the 1880s, Saratoga was “a notorious town” with seven saloons and whispers of opium dens and illegal lotteries.
By this time, Saratoga had begun to diversify, adding farming, manufacturing, and resorts to its economy. Cardboard and paper were important local products, but it was agriculture, primarily fruit orchards, that eventually became the small town’s calling card. Beginning in the 1860s shortly after Saratoga’s “timber period,” apricots, cherries, walnuts, almonds, grapes, and, most commonly, prunes, slowly became the west valley’s most enduring export. This period lasted all the way up to and past World War II, when, during Santa Clara County’s greatest period of sustained growth, the potential profits of replacing orchards with residential developments became too tempting for local farmers to resist. Worried about rumblings of annexation from the city of San Jose, Saratoga was incorporated in 1956.
Saratoga has come a long way since the days of the “Saratoga Drunk,” a 19th-century pejorative for mill workers who came down from the hills on payday and blew their entire checks in Saratoga saloons. But the town continues to honor its past through its historic downtown, its yearly Blossom Festival, and its robust local historical society.
