City of Pleasanton Hosts Autumn Heritage Orchard Pressing and Living History Weekend at Alviso Adobe Park

Naturalists with the City of Pleasanton Library and Recreation Department kicked off the annual Autumn Heritage Orchard Harvest and Living History Weekend on Friday afternoon at Alviso Adobe Community Park at 3465 Old Foothill Road in western Pleasanton. Nestled along the eastern slopes of the Pleasanton Ridge Regional Park corridor, the seven-acre interpretive park preserves the 1854 Francisco Alviso adobe residence—one of the oldest continuously standing adobe structures in Alameda County—alongside a reconstructed twentieth-century Meadowlark Dairy bunkhouse and a heritage fruit and nut orchard. Over Friday's school preview and Saturday and Sunday public sessions, families can hand-crank traditional oak-slat cider presses filled with late-season Newtown Pippin and Gravenstein apples.

Following a wet spring and mild summer across the Amador Valley, park horticulturists reported a bumper autumn yield from the park's organically tended fig, pomegranate, walnut, almond, and heritage apple trees. After pressing fresh sweet cider, children can dip handmade beeswax tapers, churn butter inside the dairy milk house, and learn how indigenous Ohlone families harvested and leached black oak acorns along Arroyo de la Laguna tributaries.

Inside the newly climate-stabilized second floor of the 1854 adobe, museum docents from the Museum on Main are exhibiting nineteenth-century Californio rancho branding irons, Spanish land-grant survey maps of Rancho Santa Rita, and oral histories from families who operated the Meadowlark Certified Dairy from 1919 through 1969. New tactile Braille trail markers and audio-guide QR posts were added along the paved creekside loop this month.

Admission to the Alviso Adobe grounds, heritage orchard trails, and weekend living-history demonstrations is free to the public from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM on Saturday, October 24, and Sunday, October 25, with optional $5 materials tickets for candle-dipping and cider-pressing crafts. Families can view the weekend schedule and register for November nature programs on the Alviso Adobe Community Park Portal.