In 1952, Ford Motor Corporation decided to relocate its northern
California assembly
plant from Richmond, where it had outgrown the available site, to
Milpitas. At the
time, Milpitas was unincorporated county land to the northeast of
San José.
However, the Western Pacific Railroad had bought up 1,600 acres of
mostly west and northwest Milpitas after 1946 to create an
industrial park. Much of the acreage was marshy wetlands. The
railroad dug drainage ditches, connected to potable water, and
started building a sewer system so that Santa Clara County would
issue permits for the industrial park. The Ford company
purchased about 160 acres from the Western Pacific Railroad. Since
the closest city to the plant was
San José, Ford called their new plant the San Jose Ford Motor
Assembly Plant.
Our city formed as a defensive incorporation in 1954 to keep the
Ford plant and the village from being swallowed
up by a growing San José. In 1960, an election was held to
determine whether
young Milpitas would join with the expanding San José. The local
activists in
favor of remaining independent of the larger city to the south saw
themselves as
fighting off a behemoth. Because they thought of their campaign
against incorporation
into San José as the same kind of fight for independence that our
forefathers
waged in the Revolutionary War against the British, they made
their symbol the minuteman
and following their overwhelmingly lopsided victory in the
election, they made the
image of the famous minuteman statue part of the official city
seal.
In the early 1980s the Ford plant stopped operations. Gradually,
machinery was removed from the lines and moved to other
facilities. In 1992, Ford determined to transform the
defunct plant into a modern enclosed shopping mall called The
Great Mall of the Bay Area.