Community Corner
What's a Cupertino?
From creek to fruit to a fruitful high-tech company, Cupertino has a storied history.
The origin of the name goes back to de Anza. Not the college, the Spanish explorer who camped along a creek here on his expedition from Monterey to San Francisco in 1776. A historic date in United States history, but Juan Bautista de Anza wasn't too impressed with what he found here.
In his diary on March 25 he wrote that his company "arrived at the Arroyo San José de Cupertino, which is useful only for travelers."
An arroyo is a stream or creek, and de Anza's was later renamed Stevens Creek after Elijah Stephens, the guide who lead the Stephens-Townsend-Murphy Party, the first wagon train to cross the Sierra Nevada to California (two years before the ill-fated Donner Party)—but that's another story.
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The name Cupertino was given by de Anza's cartographer, in honor of Saint Joseph of Cupertino, a recently canonized Italian from the village of Copertino in the Apulia region of Italy. Born Giuseppe Maria Desa, in 1603, he was later known as Giuseppe (Joseph) da Copertino.
St. Joseph of Cupertino, who lived to be 60 years old, had the miraculous ability to defy gravity and float in the air. For this reason he is recognized as the patron saint of air travelers, aviators, astronauts, test takers, weak students and people with mental handicaps.
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The city name Cupertino first became widely used when John T. Doyle named his winery on McClellan Road "Cupertino" in the late 1800s. Doyle turned to agriculture after practicing law in San Francisco from 1853 until 1888.
By the turn of the 20th century, Cupertino displaced the former name for the region, which was West Side.
The Roman Catholic church, dedicated to was built in 1907 on an acre of land denoted by a local resident. The building, which seated 180, served the parish for nearly 46 years. The current structure was built in 1953.
Incorporated in 1955, Cupertino developed from the site of a stream "useful only for travelers," into a center of fruit agriculture that gave way to housing. Now Cupertino is a highly desirable location for top-notch schooling, and, of course, home of computers—or casa de Manzana computadoras, as de Anza would say.
