Milpitas is a city in Santa Clara County, California. It is located with San Jose, California to its south and Fremont, California to its north, at the eastern end of California State Route 237 and generally between Interstates Interstate 680 (California) and Interstate 880 (California) which run roughly north/south through the city. With Alameda County, California bordering directly on the north, Milpitas sits in the extreme northeast section of the South Bay (San Francisco, California), bordering the East Bay (San Francisco Bay Area) and Fremont, California. Milpitas is also located within the Silicon Valley. The corporate headquarters of Maxtor,...

Milpitas is a city in Santa Clara County, California. It is located with San Jose, California to its south and Fremont, California to its north, at the eastern end of California State Route 237 and generally between Interstates Interstate 680 (California) and Interstate 880 (California) which run roughly north/south through the city. With Alameda County, California bordering directly on the north, Milpitas sits in the extreme northeast section of the South Bay (San Francisco, California), bordering the East Bay (San Francisco Bay Area) and Fremont, California. Milpitas is also located within the Silicon Valley. The corporate headquarters of Maxtor, LSI Logic, Solectron, Adaptec, Intersil, and SanDisk sit within the industrial zones of Milpitas.

History
Milpitas was first inhabited by the Tamyen (also spelled Thomien, Tamien, Thamien, or Tamiayn), a linguistic subgroup of the Muwekma Ohlone Indians who had resided in the San Francisco Bay Area for thousands of years. The Ohlone Indians lived a traditional life based on everyday hunting and gathering. Some of the Ohlone lived in various villages within what is now modern-day Milpitas, including sites underneath what are now the Calvary Assembly of God Church and Higuera Adobe Park.#Bibliography Archaeological evidence gathered from Ohlone graves at the Elmwood Correctional Facility in 1993 revealed a rich trade with other tribes from Sacramento to Monterey.

During the Spanish expeditions of the late 1700s, several Spanish Missions of California were founded in the San Francisco Bay Area. During the mission period, Milpitas served as a crossroads between Mission San Jos?? de Guadalupe in modern-day Fremont, California and Mission Santa Clara de Asis, in present Santa Clara. The land in modern-day Milpitas was divided between the 6,352.9-acre (25.7 km2) Rancho Rincon de los Esteros, the 4,457.66-acre (18.0 km²) Rancho Milpitas and the 4,394-acre (17.8 km²) Rancho Tularcitos. Ignacio Alviso was granted Rancho Rincon de Los Esteros, Jos?? Higuera was granted Rancho Tularcitos, and Jos?? Mar??a Alviso occupied Rancho Milpitas (The latter now has a middle school named after it in southeast Milpitas.). Jose Maria Alviso was the son of Francisco Xavier Alviso and Maria Bojorquez, both of whom arrived in San Francisco as children with the De Anza Expedition. (A son of Ignacio Alviso was also named Jose Maria Alviso, this has led to some confusion by researchers.) Due to Jose Maria Alviso's descendents difficulty securing his claims to the Rancho Milpitas property, much of his land was either swindled from the Alviso family or had to be quickly sold to American settlers. Both landowners had built prominent adobe homes on their properties. Today, both adobes still exist and are the oldest structures in Milpitas. The seriously eroded walls of the Higuera Adobe, now in Higuera Adobe Park, are encapsulated in a brick shell built c.1970 by Marian Weller, a descendant of pioneer Joseph Weller. but the Jose Maria Alviso Adobe can be seen mostly in its original form with one kitchen addition made by the Cuciz family c.1920. Prior to the city acquiring the Alviso Adobe it was the oldest continuously occupied adobe house in California dating from the Mexican period and is gradually being restored and undergoing seismic upgrades by the City of Milpitas. Alviso Adobe History Park is to be opened, after the restoration is completed, as an educational museum with historic items, trees, buildings, and documents.


In the 1850s, large numbers of Americans of England, Germany, and Ireland descent arrived to farm the fertile lands of Milpitas. The Burnett, Rose, Dempsey, Jacklin, Trimble, Ayer, Parks, Wool, Weller, Minnis, and Evans are among the early settlers of Milpitas. #Bibliography (Today many schools, streets, and parks have been named in honor of these families.) These early settlers farmed the land and set up many businesses on a section of what was then called Mission Road, which by the late 20th century became known as the'Midtown'district. Yet another influx of immigration came in the 1870s and 1880s as Portuguese sharecroppers from the Azores came to farm the Milpitas hillsides. Many of the Azoreans had such locally well-known surnames like Coelho, Covo, Mattos, Nunes, Spangler, Serpa, and Silva.

There is a local legend that during the late 1800s, when the U.S. Postal Service wanted to locate a Post Office in the town, there was some support for naming the town, Penitencia, after the small Roman Catholic confessional building that served local Indians and ranchers and that stood near Penitencia Creek which ran along the Mission Road. Prominent land owner and civic leader, Joseph Weller, felt the Spanish word Penitencia might be confused with the English word'penitentiary. 'Instead of choosing Penitencia, he suggested another popular name for the area, Milpitas, after the name of Alviso's property, Rancho Milpitas.