The Archer family came to California by way of Sacramento and San Francisco, settling in San Jose in January 1853. Judge Lawrence Archer won election as mayor in 1856, served one term, then was elected county judge in 1867 before resigning in 1871. He won the mayoralty again in 1877. The family's land holdings grew over the decades. Archer planted 30 acres with cherry, apricot, and prune trees, creating the orchard landscape that would define the property for a century. His daughter Louise married Frank Kelley, owner of the Star-Peerless Wallpaper Mills in Chicago, and the couple eventually returned to California around 1910 when Louise inherited the family estate known as Lone Oak. The 1910 house and a later carriage house are the only structures that survive from the family's time.

After Louise Kelley's death, the city continued purchasing parcels of the AR-KEL and Lone Oak estate until it had assembled 156 acres bounded by Story Road, Coyote Creek, Phelan Avenue, and Senter Road. In 1956, advocates Campen and Renzel approached the city about developing the property as a children's park. The result was Happy Hollow, which opened in 1961 as a small amusement area and zoo that has been a rite of passage for San Jose children ever since. The Leininger Center followed in 1966 as the park's administrative hub, the place where citizens still go to apply for picnic permits and group reservations. Coyote Creek winds through the heart of the park, connecting the lawns, groves, and pathways that make up the quieter stretches between the attractions.

The Japanese Friendship Garden, dedicated in October 1965, was patterned after the famous Korakuen Garden in Okayama, one of San Jose's sister cities. Six acres of carefully designed landscape surround three main ponds that were stocked with koi sent from Okayama in 1966. The garden has weathered its share of adversity. In 2009, a deadly fish virus killed 90 percent of the koi. In 2017, Coyote Creek flooded the gardens, submerging the lower pond and most of the tea house. Repairs to the tea house were completed by 2022, though other flood damage has been slower to mend. The garden endures because sister-city relationships, like the one between San Jose and Okayama, are maintained through acts of rebuilding as much as through acts of creation.

History Park, whose construction began in 1965, preserves and interprets San Jose's past through relocated and reconstructed historic buildings. Within it, the Portuguese Historical Museum documents the contributions of the Portuguese community that has shaped the city since the nineteenth century, while the Viet Museum tells the story of Vietnamese Americans whose presence transformed San Jose's east side into the largest Vietnamese community outside Vietnam. Behind History Park, an 18-hole disc golf course occupies a walnut orchard, the trees providing shade and obstacles in equal measure. The juxtaposition is pure San Jose: a serious museum of immigrant history shares acreage with a sport invented in the 1960s, all on land that was once a judge's prune orchard. The park does not resolve these contrasts. It holds them together.