21-Mile House

In 1852 William Host built a rough tavern beneath a spreading oak at the side of the road running south from San Jose to Monterey. The name “21 Mile House” was purely practical: the place sat exactly 21 miles south of San Jose, and travelers needed to know how far they'd come and how far they had left to go. Host sold it almost immediately to William Tennant, an Irish immigrant from County Wexford who had previously made his living as a piano tuner. What a piano tuner knew about running a frontier roadhouse is anyone's guess, but Tennant threw himself into it. When the Butterfield Overland Stage began running through Morgan Hill in 1860, the 21 Mile House became known as Tennant Station, an official stop on the line. By the time Tennant died in 1885, he had also added a post office and a blacksmith shop, and the place had become a genuine crossroads of South County life. 

The Station also has a notorious history. On July 24, 1873, its most infamous visitor arrived uninvited. Tiburcio Vásquez, California's most feared bandido at the time, rode up to the 21 Mile House with five armed companions. They walked into the bar room, drew their revolvers, bound the four men inside, stripped the place of every coin and valuables they could find, and before riding off, helped themselves to drinks at the bar. The oak tree outside, the same tree where Vásquez and his men had tied their horses during the robbery, would carry his name from that day forward. He was captured the following year and hanged in San Jose, convicted of murders committed during a separate raid in Tres Pinos.

The building itself didn't survive into the modern era. In 1915 it was torn down, and a more modern structure was erected on the site. The property passed through several hands over the following decades. It became a service station owned by a local family with deep Morgan Hill roots, Lewis Eastman Downer and his wife Thelma Fern Saine, who revived the name of 21 Mile Station. It was later a fruit stand that operated until 1972, when the rerouting of Highway 101 drew traffic away from Monterey Road, and the business quietly closed. Today, the Vineyard Town Center occupies this corner. The oak tree is gone, too. But the California Historical Landmark plaque remains, marking the location of the 21 Mile Station and the Vasquez Tree.