Open hillside in the Santa Cruz foothills
West Santa Clara is a rural, unincorporated stretch of the Santa Cruz foothills above Cupertino, best known for Permanente Quarry, where limestone mining began in 1902 and grew into one of the Pacific coast's largest cement operations under Henry Kaiser from 1939, supplying the Navy during World War II.
A ridge of quarry and vineyard above Cupertino
You're standing in open country in West Santa Clara, a rural stretch of unincorporated land in the hills above Cupertino. No town center sits here. Instead there's ridge, creek, and open space, much of it now county parkland.
Limestone miners once worked the slopes of Permanente Quarry. Quarrying started in 1902, feeding a sugar refinery across the bay. The operation stayed small until 1939, when Henry Kaiser bought it and built one of the busiest cement plants on the Pacific coast, supplying the Navy through World War II.
The same foothills carry a second story: grapevines. This ground sits near the edge of the Santa Cruz Mountains AVA, a wine region recognized by the federal government in 1981, built on a slope of vineyards first planted in the 1860s.
A failed vineyard sold to a rock company
Before Kaiser and before the quarry grew large, this ground was someone's failed vineyard. R. A. Swayne bought 160 acres at the headwaters of Permanente Creek in the 1890s and planted grapes, built a winery, and spent around $25,000 getting it going. The venture didn't last. Swayne sold out for $1,500, a fraction of what he'd put in.
The buyer saw rock, not wine. Granite Rock Company of Watsonville picked up the land for $2,500, drawn by the limestone underneath. In 1902, they signed a deal to supply 5,000 tons of it to the Alvarado Sugar Company, the first sugar beet factory in the country. Wagons hauled the stone nine miles to Mountain View, where it went onto Southern Pacific trains bound for a refinery in Alviso.
Cement from this ground armed the Pacific Navy
Kaiser's plant turned that same rock into cement on an industrial scale. By the early 1940s it was producing seven million barrels of cement for the Navy's Pacific war effort, more than the entire Shasta Dam project had used. Roughly seventy percent of the cement poured across Santa Clara County came from this ground.
A working quarry sits amid county parkland
The quarry still runs, owned now by Lehigh Southwest Cement. The vineyards that failed for Swayne found better footing elsewhere in the Santa Cruz Mountains AVA, which now stretches across three counties. Open space and county parkland cover much of the land around you, quiet where wagons and rail cars once hauled rock toward the bay.
You're standing on hillside that has been vineyard, quarry, and wartime cement works, now mostly open county land.
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