Greetings family, friends, and neighbors. Joining Mission San Jose, Niles, Irvington, and Centerville to form the city of Fremont, CA in 1956, Warm Springs also is also rich in history that may surprise you in today's snippet "Rancho Del Agua Caliente".........Bill
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RANCHO DEL AGUA CALIENTE
The hot mineral waters that bubbled to the surface from springs along the slope of Mission Peak, just south of old Mission San Jose, were known for millennia by the indigenous Ohlone people seeking it’s calming and healing benefits. In 1839, the Mexican Governor granted nine thousand acres and access to the hot waters of Agua Caliente creek to Fulgencio Higuera who constructed an adobe dwelling near the springs and named his rancho del Agua Caliente. Higuera sold the parcel, used primarily for bathing and laundering by nearby Spanish families and by gold seekers on their way or returning from the Sierra foothills, to entrepreneur frenchman Clemente Columbet who planted a vineyard in 1850 and created the first Hot Springs Resort on the West Coast.
Columbet’s extensive fashionable Warm Springs Resort complex consisted of four hotels and a hospital fed warm soda-borax- sulpher enhanced water from Agua Caliente Creek, two wine cellers, stables and barns. In it’s heyday, the spa attracted the likes of the Governor of Mexico and business elite including George Hearst, Domingo Ghiradelli, and Adolph Sutro, Mayor of San Francisco.
Leland Stanford, Governor of California, bought the Agua Caliente complex in 1870 as a private estate managed by his brother where he raised horses and improved the vineyards and winery with the intention of serving the exclusive vintage wine on the transcontinental railroad. Although Stanford may have preferred the Warm Springs for the possible site of a University, the twelve hundred acre winery was becoming highly successful and the majority of family land holding were located at the family “farm” on the San Francisco Peninsula. The Stanford family sold the property in 1923 where it exchanged hands several more times including serving briefly as the Hidden Valley Dude Ranch. Fred and Rudolf Weibel purchased the historic winery located on along Mission Blvd. between Mission San Jose and Warm Springs in 1940 and operated the Weibel Champagne Vineyards until being squeezed out by urban encroachment in 1985. The Higuera Adobe and a 1870 Stanford Winery building have been restored, traces of the Warm Spring Hotel are gone, and the warm waters of Agua Caliente Creek still flow down the slopes of Mission Peak.
Bill-12/25
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