Known all his life as “Billy,” Burnett was born in 1848 in Missouri. When he was 11 years old, he started out with his family—parents, two sisters, and grandmother—in a covered wagon across the plains on the Old Oregon Trail.

The family spent two years crossing the country and then coming south from Oregon to central California. Shortly before they reached their destination in Santa Clara County, tragedy struck the family when Billy’s father became ill and died in Stockton, leaving Billy, at age 13, as the man of the family. The family went on to Mountain View and lived there for the next several years.

Then in 1867, when Billy was 19, he and his mother purchased 170 acres from Marshall Pomeroy (who later became one of the first teachers in Milpitas schools) for $2500. This property is east of the current Evans Road. They had a small vineyard and almond orchard there, but Billy’s main focus was raising cattle. He grazed many cattle back in the hills behind the present Calaveras Reservoir in a valley known as Arroyo Hondo, and partnered with other ranchers to run even more cattle.

He remained a bachelor throughout his life. In Milpitas he lived with his mother and younger sisters. His sister Fanny later became the first woman to work at the State Capitol in Sacramento. And his sister Annie’s daughter Grace married into the pioneer Evans family.

After many years of ranching, he and his mother sold their land in two sections, one in 1894 to “Whiskers” Rodriguez, and the other, a few years later, to the Evans brothers (one of whom was married to his niece). Billy moved to San Jose, and soon after that to Palo Alto. He continued raising cattle in the Calaveras country in various partnerships until his death in 1931 at 83. He was always known as Billy or Uncle Billy, and was as respected as an elder for his kindness and honesty as he had been in his youth.

William Burnett Elementary School was dedicated in 1963 and has won high ratings for the quality of the education it provides its students

In case you were wondering: Although they had the same last name, William Burnett was not related to Peter Hardeman Burnett, who was the first Governor of California when it was admitted to the Union in 1850. Governor Burnett had a street in Alviso named for him. He lived there between 1850-1854 before moving to San Jose. That street’s name was changed to Taylor Street in the 1970’s as the streets were merged.

One was a Rancho Milpitas formed when the lands of the Mission San Antonio de Padua, (in Monterey County, near today’s King City) were secularized and divided into Mexican land grants. When William Randolph Hearst acquired the rancho in 1925, he commissioned architect Julia Morgan (who also designed Hearst Castle, some 30 miles from there) to build the Hacienda Milpitas for his employees and guests. It was completed in 1930 and has also been known as Hacienda Guest Lodge and Milpitas Ranchhouse, under which name the property was placed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1977.

Although the land was acquired by the U.S. War Department in 1940 to create a troop training facility, and the Hacienda was used as housing by the military during WWII and after, today, the US Army Reserve operates the base, and a civilian concessionaire is allowed to run the Milpitas Hacienda as a hotel open both to the public and to the military.

The other was, according to Spanish and Indian Place Names of California, by Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez, the the crop and garden area of Mission San Antonio de Pala, in San Diego County. The Mission was founded in 1861 as an “asistencia” to its parent, Mission San Luis Rey de Francia, about 25 miles east of San Luis Rey, and is now located inside the Pala Indian Reservation.

Alfred French arrived in the Santa Clara Valley from Ohio, by way of the Gold Country in 1852, in the company of other early settlers Dudley Wells and Nicholas Harris.

The original hotel structure, located on the northwest corner of Serra and Main Street, was built by Alex Anderson (on a lot rented from Michael Hughes, Milpitas’ first American settler) and run briefly by two other people before French purchased it. County records show that in 1859, French paid A.M. Thompson $1500 for the parcel of land on which the hotel and stable were located. French’s Hotel burned down on January 17, 1861, but French immediately rebuilt it and kept it running for at least 30 years.

The US Census of 1860 lists the French family as Alfred, Nancy, John S., Theodore, E. E., William E., and their oldest daughter Clemina French (age 25) who was one of the first school teachers in the first Milpitas Grammar School, then recently built on Higuera grant land owned by Abraham Weller at the north end of town.

When French sold it in the 1890’s, it became the Milpitas Hotel, which burned down again in the great Milpitas fire of August 1910 that destroyed three saloons, two barbershops, and a grocery store as well.

French served as a Justice of the Peace in Milpitas from the 1860s to the 1880s. Around 1890, he retired and moved to San Jose.

The lot on which the hotel once stood has remained more or less intact down to the present day. By the mid 1920s, a Fat Boy Barbeque Restaurant was erected on the site. The Fat Boy Restaurants were one of the first “fast food” chains in America and the one in Milpitas was a landmark for community connection for many years until it finally closed in the 1970’s. Today the site is occupied by a dental office building with a fine display of local history in the lobby.

The William F. Downing family came from Nevada in 1881 and bought land east of the Evans ranch and north of Laguna Valley, where Downing Road was later cut into Calaveras Road. The ranch was purchased from Henry Curtner and was part of Ranchos Tularcitos and Agua Caliente.

One of the first to rent land from the Downings was Joseph Silva, who came to the area in 1886 and whose family continued to farm the land half way through the 20th century.

William F. Downing’s son, George Lucas Downing, (1879-1931) continued the tradition of tenant farming.

He encouraged the local Portuguese farmers, whose knowledge of farming and willingness to work he respected, to send for their relatives in the Azores Islands. He would give them a house, a barn, a cow, and a plot of land. Two thirds of their season’s profit would go to the tenant farmer, and the rest would go to Mr. Downing. As many as 30 tenant families farmed the Downing land, grateful for the opportunity to come the United States.

In 1903, Airpoint School was built at the corner of Downing Road and Calaveras Road, so that children of the Downing and other nearby ranches would have a school within reasonable distance of their homes. George Lucas Downing was a long-time trustee of Airpoint School.

George Lucas Downing and his wife Georgia had three children, Jerome and Lorraine, both of whom died young, and Suzanne, who grew up to marry the younger George Abel, the son of another pioneer Milpitas settler.

Kraig Bunnell’s theory of the naming of  Milpitas. He also talks about the origins of other names in our city.

Evans came to Milpitas in 1853 from Ohio after a few years in the California gold fields, during which time he founded the Butte County city of Evansville. He bought 800 acres of Rancho Tularcitos land in 1853. His ranch was described in 1874 by a reporter for the San Jose Mercury as having fine orchards of fruit and nut trees. The present day road follows the same route as the historic road that served the ranches of the 1860s.

In 1862, his daughter, America Evans, married Samuel Ayer, another Milpitas pioneer rancher, who became a respected long-time county supervisor, for whom the first high school in Milpitas was named. That school (1959- 1980) was located at 1395 E. Calaveras Blvd, the current location of the Milpitas Sports Center.

The last existing scow schooner, the Alma, is on display at the Maritime Museum in San Francisco. Built in 1891, the Alma was found rotting on the Alviso mud flats and rescued in 1959 and was restored in by the state park service.

Committee Chairs:
Barbara Bowman, Membership, Museum Maintenance, and Refreshments
Bob Kruse, Fire Truck
Dennis Cuciz, Police Car
Sherry Cullen, Newsletter
Bill Hare, Historian

Joe Brown, a local painter, painted the original for free. It is believed that Mr. Brown may have been hired to repaint the statues in the old St. John’s Church. Mr. Brown lived on the Henry Strickroth/Murphy Ranch.