During the later 1800s, the developing Santa Clara Valley demanded more farm products as California settlements needed wheat and produce to feed growing Gold Rush populations. After the Transcontinental Railroad of 1869 linked the valley to national markets, fruit became Santa Clara County’s leading product, and Rancho Santa Teresa lands shifted from cattle ranching to farming. On his inherited 395 acres, Ygnacio Bernal planted orchards, hay, and other crops. Fruit trees thrived in the fertile soil of the rancho’s former slaughtering grounds, where blood, refuse meat, and cow carcasses had been dumped for decades; peach saplings reached ten feet in three years and outpaced nearby new orchards, while prune trees became some of the valley’s largest and best fruit producers. The Bernals were recognized as the oldest and longest-lasting orchardists in the Santa Clara Valley, and Ygnacio’s was the first large-scale orchard in the Santa Teresa-Edenvale area. In 1895, his trees numbered 400 prune, 100 peach, and 100 apricot, with corn, soup peas, beans, muskmelons, and pumpkins planted between them. By 1900, ranch children’s chores included picking fruit, hoeing and weeding crop rows, planting seeds, and packing harvested fruits and vegetables into boxes for shipping, and Ygnacio Bernal prospered as a farmer.