Santa Clara (CA) (Images of America)

Santa Clara, named for the prosperous Spanish mission founded there in 1777, lies in a place once called the "Valley of Heart's Delight." Its black fertile loam produced thousands of acres of bright flowers and vegetables for the largest seed farm in the world, and much of the rest was blanketed in springtime with fruit blossoms. The wealth of its pre-eminent tanning, wood manufacturing, and fruit packing industries gave way to another type of opportunity in the 1950s with the emergence of the semi-conductor. The tiny chip that transformed the world of communication spawned new companies here like Intel, National Semi-Conductor, and Applied Materials, which earned the now urban economic powerhouse a new name, Silicon Valley.