Ardenwood Historic Farm (Fremont, California)

 park, farm, NRHP - National Register of Historic Places, historic landmark, historic district

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34600 Ardenwood Boulevard
Fremont, CA 94555
(510) 544-2797
www.ebparks.org/parks/ardenwood/

George Washington Patterson was a forty-niner from Lafayette, Indiana, who left the gold fields to settle on the rich alluvial plain created by Alameda Creek, on the southeastern shore of San Francisco Bay.

He accumulated properties to form a 4,000-acre ranch in this area known as Washington Township and an additional 10,000 acres inland in the Livermore Valley. In 1877, he married Clara Hawley and added on to his home to create the Queen Anne style mansion that now is the centerpiece of the Ardenwood Regional Preserve, a historic farm operated by the East Bay Regional Park District on former Patterson ranch lands.

Since George Patterson's death in 1895, three generations of his descendants continued to oversee the ranch operations, sharecropped in the earlier years by tenants who grew vegetable crops on family farms and later leased to larger-scale and more modernized agricultural operations. Agriculture continued to flourish on Patterson ranch lands while surrounding lands succumbed to the pressures of urbanization from the burgeoning Bay Area metropolis in the post-World War II population explosion.

The rapid urbanization of the area brought with it inevitable political changes. The several small unincorporated towns of Washington Township Alvarado and Decoto; Irvington, Mission San Jose, Niles, Centerville, and Warm Springs; and Newark incorporated into the three cities of Union City, Fremont, and Newark in the 1950s. The Alameda County Water District, formed to conserve the ground water for the area's farmers, expanded its operation and its water supplies to deliver water to suburban customers. The Alameda County Flood Control District channelized Alameda Creek, putting an end to rich alluvial deposits, but making year-round farming and, most significantly, housing development possible on the northern flood plain.

By the 1970s the Patterson family succumbed to development pressures and began selling off major portions of ranch lands for housing development. Their sale to Singer Housing of the lands surrounding the historic mansion and its landmark eucalyptus trees precipitated the controversy that, after several years of lawsuits and negotiations, resulted in the creation of Ardenwood Regional Preserve. In the 1980s, the family organized into a corporation with professional management from family members and has managed the development process in accordance with a master plan that emphasizes planned development and preservation of open space. Three regional parks are on former Patterson lands: in addition to Ardenwood, the Coyote Hills and surrounding marshlands are preserved, and in Livermore, the Del Valle Regional Park stands in the middle of Patterson cattle lands. Adjacent to the industrial park and the suburban housing tracts, land is still used to grow produce for Bay Area gourmets.

National Register of Historic Places # 1985003043

Extensive documentation and oral histories: www.archive.org/stream/pattersonfamily01lagerich/patter...