Cherryhill, Sunnyvale Homes for sale, recent sales and a Property Nerd’s guide

Cherryhill is the neighborhood association's own spelling; the city's registry writes it Cherry Hill. The association formed in early 2008 and filed its papers with the city that June. It describes its area as the blocks bounded by Highway 85, Remington Drive, Mary Avenue and Fremont Avenue, with roughly 541 homes and 324 apartments in two complexes. A smaller registered group, the Valley Forge Neighborhood Group Association (2005, about 50 households), covers a block of Valley Forge and Yorktown drives inside those lines.

The land's story starts well before the tract houses. The William Wright ranch house on Cranberry Avenue is a Sunnyvale Heritage Landmark, and the Sunnyvale Heritage Park Museum calls it the oldest house in Sunnyvale. Wright came west from Maryland in 1849 to look for gold, then bought 160 acres from Martin Murphy Jr. and farmed wheat, barley and livestock, adding fruit later. Most sources date the house to about 1862; it was later remodeled in the Gothic Revival manner, and around 1918 it gained more gables, a portico and a sunroom. A petition to subdivide the last 1.56 acres around it came in 1961, and the house was kept. It's a private home, so admire it from the sidewalk.

Wright Avenue, which runs south from the neighborhood across Fremont Avenue, may carry the family name: the museum notes that the family asked the city to name the ranch's mile-long driveway Wright Avenue, though it doesn't say whether the city agreed. The ranch-house tracts around it went up in the mid-1950s and early 1960s.

Cherryhill also holds a small Eichler tract. The city's parcel records flag 38 houses in county tract 2823 as Eichlers, all built in 1962, on Maraschino Drive, Susquehanna Court, Sherwood Court, Mary Avenue and Ticonderoga Drive. None of them is in a single-story district. Every Sunnyvale Eichler, counted has the tract-by-tract numbers.