Santa Clara’s Chamber of Commerce Part of Modern Santa Clara’s DNA

It’s no accident that Santa Clara is the home of some of high tech’s biggest players. The city’s post-WWII infrastructure investments and city-owned electric utility were central to that, but the work of Santa Clara’s chamber of commerce was instrumental in making investments for the future into realities.

The Silicon Valley Central Chamber’s roots go back to the 1910s when a small group of businessmen began to meet regularly to talk about the future of the region. In 1916, California Cultivator reported that the Santa Clara Chamber of Council adopted a resolution supporting a bond for road improvement.

Two decades later, a chamber committee organized Santa Clara Day at the Golden Gate Exposition in San Francisco, and organize a city beautification project for the Exposition that would, it was hoped, bring many visitors as well as businesses looking to expand in California to the city.*

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“Santa Clara ‘goes to town’ next Sunday, May 28,” wrote the May 23, 1939, Santa Clara Journal, “when citizens of this city add a new note of gaiety and enthusiasm to the regular program at the Golden Gate International Exposition, by putting on a real celebration of their own.”

Sadly, the Exposition’s organizers snubbed the city when Santa Clarans arrived to celebrate their moment in the sun, and it would be many decades before Santa Clara showed it deserved international recognition.

In 1941, the chamber sponsored a promotional brochure encouraging businesses and their employees to move to Santa Clara; a city whose amenities included low taxes, a large “sinking fund”— reserves —and the additional recommendation that, “All the Streets Are Paved!” with “durable cement.”

The informal business organization incorporated as the Santa Clara Chamber of Commerce in 1947. In the post-WW II era, the chamber was instrumental in promoting Santa Clara as an attractive location for the emerging tech economy.

During the 1960s, when Silicon Valley was an embryo, the chamber published “Industrial Introduction to the City of Santa Clara,” a city that was “geared for growth.”

Santa Clara had “a large skilled labor market oriented toward technical and scientific needs,” its own philharmonic orchestra and concerts featuring “guest soloists of national and international repute,” “multimillion dollar expressway programs” to be completed by 1968, and was “home [of] the famous Santa Clara Swim Team.”

“They got behind a few very strong initiatives, one of which was the Lawrence Expressway, at that time called Lawrence Station Road,” said former Chamber President and CEO Steve Van Dorn at the chamber’s 2025 annual awards breakfast.

“They started working with Intel, AMD, and National, and asked, ‘What would we need to do to get you to come here?’ They said, ‘change this road. We would save 28 minutes [traveling] each way, which is almost an hour. And that costs money.’ So because of the Lawrence Expressway, we were able to bring Intel, AMD, and National to this region,” continued Van Dorn.

In 2002, under Van Dorn’s leadership, the chamber added a visitors bureau to its mission and was instrumental in managing and promoting the city’s convention center and supporting major projects like Levi’s Stadium.

In 2019, the chamber changed its name to Silicon Valley Central Chamber of Commerce, reflecting the broader of focus of the group, and this year simplified its name to Silicon Valley Chamber of Commerce, after that the Silicon Valley Organization reverted to its former name, San José Chamber of Commerce.

The California Exposition’s Pageant of the Pacific is long in the past. But with some of the biggest companies making their homes in Santa Clara, and the World Cup and the Super Bowl coming here next year, it’s clear the little city that believed it deserved a place in the world’s eye in 1939 has shown that it deserves a place on the world’s stage for decades to come.

*El Camino Real had been paved in 1912. One of the aims of the project was to bring motorists from the Exposition to the South Bay.

You can view historical chamber scrapbooks from 1937 to 1961 via the City library at https://www.calameo.com/accounts/441915. You can find Industrial Introduction to the City of Santa Clara, California 1964 at sclibrary.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S146C1505949.

Carolyn Schuk can be reached at carolyn@santaclaraweekly.com.

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