It Happened Here

Juana Briones was a healer, an early landowner, and an entrepreneur. She also secured a divorce from her abusive husband, which was unheard of at the time. As a woman of mixed heritage who accomplished so much, she was a trailblazer. Native, Spanish, Mexican, and...

DON JESUS RAMOS Don Jesus Ramos, a native of Mexico who came to California in search of gold, arrived in Mayfield in 1851 - a year after California became a state - and worked as foreman for Don Secundino Robles. At age 48, he married 16-year-old Julia Gallegos, who...

Leland Stanford was born into a well-off farming family in New York state. After passing his bar exam in 1848, he moved to Wisconsin to practice law. In 1850, he married Jane Lathrop of Albany, New York. After three years in Wisconsin, Leland moved to California,...

Photo courtesy of Kimberley Wong. Story courtesy of William Warrior.Wong Foon Yen was born in 1908 in China’s Guangdong Province. Her father had moved to California in 1882, briefly returning to China to marry her mother. After fourteen months of married life, he left...

By PAHA Historian Steve Staiger and PAHA Board member Leslie Mills Photo: Mrs. Armour and her students at Castilleja School celebrate the end of the war while wearing flu masks, 1919  courtesy of Castilleja School It is likely that more Americans have heard of the...

Victor Mikhail Arnautoff (1896-1979) was a Russian-born painter and Stanford art professor for over 20 years. The son of a Russian Orthodox priest, he showed talent from an early age and intended to make art his career – but history had other ideas. When World War I...

Folksinger Joan Baez is an iconic symbol of the 1960s protest movement. In her opposition to the war in Vietnam she was jailed twice, once for blocking the entrance to the Armed Forces Induction Center in Oakland. In 1965 she founded the Institute for the Study of...

Known as the Godfather of Silicon Valley, Roy Clay Sr. was not only one of the first pioneers in the world of computer software during the late '50s but a pioneer for African Americans breaking into the tech field. Whilst future techies such as Steve Jobs and Bill...

There is no place quite like Palo Alto. The birthplace of Silicon Valley — incubator of tech giants such as HP, Facebook and Google –the city thrives on innovation. Since its founding on April 23, 1894, Palo Alto has played a pivotal role in the arts, education,...