Our History

The Roots of Evergreen series

The San Francisco Bay region has been a hot spot of human activity long before events were recorded. Our beautiful Evergreen area is a part of that and first...

John Montgomery—Local aviation pioneer that history nearly forgot (part 1)

The second oldest village in The Villages bears the name of a local aviation pioneer who was cut short in his rise to international fame by a tragic test...

History of the Evergreen area—’The House of Cribari’—the Cribari family (part 2)

In 1933, Italian born, Benjamino Cribari (1859-1942) would purchase the first portion of the Villa Lomas Azules. The family having dealt with the setback of Prohibition moved forward upon...

History of the Evergreen area—The early years of the Cribari family (part 1)

The Cribari family patriarch, Benjamin Cribari, was born in Cosenza, Italy. He married Josephine Abruzzini and had four sons before he immigrated to the United States in 1892—about the...

History of the Evergreen area—Pioneer vintner Albert Haentze

In 1915, William Wehner sold his winery and vineyards to Albert Haentze. The two men had a lot in common. Haentze (1896-1947) was also a German immigrant and a...

History of the Evergreen area—Pioneer vintner William Wehner

Probably the man who first transformed our Evergreen hillsides the most was William Wehner, a German immigrant who made his fortune in Chicago as a producer of large-scale panoramic...

History of the Evergreen area—Pioneer Rancher John McCarty

History never seems to completely evaporate, it tends to seep into the fabric of the community; leaving fragments of the past in the old ruins, the trees, landforms and...