Just as he’s done for almost 60 years, Charlie Olson continues to work in his Sunnyvale cherry orchard, producing plump and flavorful fruit–cherries so good they’ve drawn hundreds of thousands of folks, including a few celebrities, to the family fruit stand over the decades.
But there’s a tinge of sadness as Olson, one of a dying breed of local farmers born to the soil, prepares for this spring’s harvest. It is most likely the orchard’s last. The Olson family is seeking to replace it with a discount retail store.
“This is the only job I’ve ever had. One of the reasons I’ve done it for so long is because it’s fun,” said the 62-year-old Olson, whose grandparents, Carl and Hannah, started it all back in 1899. “I would say it gets in your blood.”
Their cherries have drawn rave reviews from Prince Albert of Monaco, chef Julia Child and the late newspaper columnist Herb Caen, to name a few.
Customers who have walked in the door of the orchard’s fruit stand have included San Francisco 49ers head coach Bill Walsh, Tom Selleck, Andy Griffith and B.B. King.
This claim to fame has only intensified speculation over the uncertain fate of the Olson property in recent years. The 16-acre site is the most prominent, visible and famous orchard in Sunnyvale and one of the few remaining family-owned operations of its kind in the Santa Clara Valley.
The orchard’s location in the geographic heart of the city–catty-corner to the Sunnyvale Civic Center and at one of its busiest intersections, El Camino Real and Mathilda Avenue–makes it ripe for development. But the Olsons have tenaciously hung on, gambling on a cherry crop each year even though the land is worth millions of dollars.
But several years of poor crop yields, due mainly to the weather, and other factors are signaling the end of this Sunnyvale institution.
“In economic terms, it’s time,” said Deborah Olson, manager of the fruit stand and Charlie’s daughter. “We held on as long as we could, but we just can’t do it anymore.”
One high-profile part of the business will remain. The familiar white and red-trimmed C.J. Olson Cherries fruit stand will stay in business at its location on El Camino Real, offering its sweet wares and fruits from other orchards to old fans and newcomers alike.
The orchard’s demise has been under study for some time. Two years ago, the Olsons asked the city council to allow commercial development on the site and began negotiating with Target Stores to lease the land for a project.
The planning commission recently recommended several actions paving the way for development, but didn’t recommend the full-fledged commercial use that the Olsons are seeking.
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The Olsons are still hoping to pursue the Target deal, and the city council is scheduled to consider development of the site in July.
The orchard’s imminent demise has struck an emotional chord among longtime residents, many of whom consider it to be a part of their personal history.
“It’s a sad thing to see happen. It’s a landmark and I personally feel it’s going to be a loss,” said Joe Gutierrez, an Olson cherry customer and member of the Sunnyvale Historical Society.
“I’m not saying that there’s any choice in the situation, but emotionally it’s troublesome. I’ll miss the open space and tranquility of that orchard.”
In the past, the loss of the orchards was looked upon as the price of progress. The Olson orchard is but one of many hundreds that disappeared to make room for the emerging Silicon Valley of the post-World War II era.
The glorious agricultural days of “The Valley of Heart’s Delight” now are remembered only in books and old photographs.
Fruit, nut and berry acreage in Santa Clara County dropped by more than 90 percent between 1960 and 1992, from 64,453 acres to 5,325, according to crop statistics from the county agricultural commissioner’s office.
The number of commercial, family-run cherry growers with three acres or larger is down to 30. The majority of the larger cherry orchards are located in the more rural south part of the county.
The loss of farmland is spreading throughout the nation. Urban development is destroying 50 acres of prime farmland every hour of every day, according to a report by the American Farmland Trust, a private, non-profit organization that advocates farm preservation.
As the last few orchards begin to fade, residents in various communities around the Santa Clara Valley are seeking to preserve what little they can to give future generations a last opportunity to see what an orchard looked like–a kind of tree museum.
“We’re beginning to regret that we were so anxious to get rid of our heritage,” said Gutierrez. “We’re desperately trying to save something that was once predominantly part of our environment.”
Gutierrez is chairman of a task force raising funds for a “living museum” project at Orchard Heritage Park, a city-owned, 10-acre apricot orchard adjacent to the Sunnyvale Community Center on Remington Avenue. Charlie Olson farms that orchard and receives the crop as payment.
The planned exhibit will feature an open-space frame structure designed to suggest a barn, and will include graphics displays and text interpreting the history of the orchard industry.
Organizers thus far have raised 20 percent of the estimated $500,000 cost through county grants, and corporate and private donations.
The original Olson orchard property was around 30 acres. The family several years ago sold 10 acres, across the street near Mathilda Avenue, for residential development. The orchard site has been farmed since 1919.
“My personal feeling is that I’m sad to see it go. It has a lot of sentimental value in Sunnyvale,” said Vice Mayor Jim Roberts, who as a youngster played in the Olson orchard and other orchards around the city.
Roberts said he knows some residents would like to keep the property as open space. But, in order to do that, he said, the Olsons would have to be willing to sell it to the city and the city would have to want to buy it.
“We don’t have $25 million laying around looking for something to do,” said Roberts. “What people need to realize is that all of our houses in Sunnyvale sit on what used to be orchards.”
Sunnyvale already owns more than 22 acres of open space at Las Palmas Park and the Sunnyvale Tennis Center, both of which are only a few hundreds yards from the Olson orchard. That open space includes a 3.5-acre city-owned cherry orchard next to the tennis center, also farmed by Charlie Olson.
The Olsons are preparing for another harvest, which starts in mid-May. And they’re hoping it will go better than last year, when the crop yield was just 40 buckets, compared to the 10 tons an acre produced in a good year. Cherries are a fragile crop, sensitive to temperature and rains.