Cambrian Park

Cambrian Park is a neighborhood and census-designated place in San Jose, California, in West San Jose. Cambrian Park was never incorporated as a town (although there were efforts to do so in the early 1960s), and much of the neighborhood is now part of the incorporated city of San Jose.

The name “Cambrian Park” was used regularly since the 1950s by the then San Jose Mercury and San Jose News newspapers (now The San Jose Mercury News) to refer to a portion of the Union school and Cambrian school areas, the latter school named in the 1870s by ranch hand David Lewis of the Jeremiah D. Casey Ranch for Cambria, the Latinized name for Wales (Welsh, Cymru), the country of Lewis’s birth. Due to the relative isolation of adjacent population centers within then rural Santa Clara County, place names and later, municipalities, were often defined by their public school service boundaries. These indistinct boundaries persisted until WWII, after which a rapidly expanding population and demand for municipal services resulted in more precise boundaries being established. The Cambrian Park area continues to be recognized as a distinct, partly unincorporated neighborhood bordering the cities of San Jose and Campbell and the town of Los Gatos.[3]