Raven's Roads
Living an interesting life: the travels and musings
of motorcycling author Linda R. Moore

Jan 11, 2007

History Nuggets: The House That Seeds Built

In Santa Clara, towering over a quiet urban street, is a magnicifent house of the kind “this author would buy in a heartbeat if she were stinking rich.” It is a beautiful Queen Anne Victorian with wooden stairs, fancy scalloped trim and little stained glass windows. Best of all, it has turrets. I have a very soft spot for loft and tower rooms, and a loft in a turret…well, that would be the bee’s knees, that would indeed.

The house is now occupied by a law firm and is not as such open to the public. However, every December some of Santa Clara’s historic houses are opened up for fund-raising tours, and I have indeed peeped inside. I got an impression of polished wood and age, softly glowing chandeliers and lovingly restored luxury. Outside, a plaque remarks that it is state historic landmark number 904. It was one of the first landmarks that I ever logged, and it is my dream house.

It was the dream house of the man who built it, too. In 1877, one Charles Copeland Morse (a failed gold miner) and A.L. Kellogg (a minister) acquired the well-established seed company of D.M. Ferry and Co, which had already started fiddling about with seed in California and produced the first commercially grown crop for the Pacific Coast, some three acres of Ferry’s Prizehead Lettuce. A few years later they branched off and started their own company, C.C. Morse and Co., keeping in touch with the original Ferry company and working together so that both enterprises were strengthened.

After C.C. Morse and Co. was incorporated in 1884, it quickly became the leading producer of flower and vegetable seed on the West Coast. In 1930 it merged with the D.M. Ferry Company. Hello Ferry-Morse Company. It is in business to this day.

Charles Copeland Morse had come to California in search of gold, but gave up after that didn’t [gratuitous pun alert] pan out. So in 1862 he made his way to Santa Clara; in those days it was still a small agricultural town, not to form part of the Silicon Valley conurbation until roughly a century later. There, he tried his hand at various non-mining jobs, and six years later married an elegant-looking lady called Maria. They had five children, he pooled resources with his minister partner, and thereafter they earned a great deal of money. Not content to be just a normal businessman, he also became a founder of the Bank of Santa Clara and the Advent Christian Church of Santa Clara.

In 1892 they built their dream house, which a newspaper dubbed “the house that seeds built.”

The marker, above mentioned, is planted in its own little garden full of colorful bright flowers.

Charles Copeland Morse Residence