Menlo Park
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Menlo Park began with the arrival of two Irishmen.
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[edit] Pre-1900s
[edit] The Birth of Menlo Park
Brother-in-laws Dennis Oliver and D.C. McGlynn purchased 1,700 acres of the 35,250 acre Rancho de las Pulgas, the largest land grant on the Peninsula.
The area is believed to have received its name, "las pulgas" or "the fleas," from an incident in 1769 when the Portola expedition was camped near the mouth of Purissima Creek. Some soldiers reportedly decided to leave the camp and sleep in deserted Indian huts on the north bank. But they fled from the huts before the night was over, crying "las pulgas!" Portola's army engineer used the name to identify the Indian village and it stuck.
Oliver and McGlynn built two houses with a common entrance among the oak-dotted landscape and erected a tall wooden gate with three arches over the entrance. On the gate they inscribed the name "Menlo Park" in foot-high letters, and the date, 1854.
The men named their new homes after their old, in Menlough on Lough Corib, County Galway, Ireland. No one knows whether they abbreviated the name to "Menlo" because the space on the arch precluded the longer version, because it was their way of Americanizing the name or because they just couldn't spell.
The gates stood on the west side of El Camino Real, about 500 feet from Santa Cruz Avenue, until they were destroyed by a motorist in 1922.
[edit] A City of Wealth and Beauty
Not long after the gates were built, in the 1860s and 1870s, the beauty of Menlo Park attracted wealthy San Franciscans to the area, including Faxon Dean Atherton, Timothy Hopkins, James C. Flood, Edgar Mills and Charles Felton. They bought large tracts of land and built vacation estates, which brought many laborers and servants to Menlo Park. Eventually, they also brought the railroad.
A newspaper advertisement in December 1863 lauded the many benefits of living in Menlo Park:
"There are few, if any, places within one hundred miles of this large and growing metropolis, which combine so many natural advantages for a country residence. The soil is excellent, it is wooded with large, splendid live oaks, and other evergreen shade trees. The climate is unsurpassed, extremes of heat and cold are never felt and the harsh summer winds and fogs never reach here. Good well water can be obtained at thirty feet...Those who are alive to the importance of a home in the country with all its advantages for health, education, etc., are earnestly requested to look at this lovely spot."
[edit] Effcts of the Railroad
For people to the north and south of San Francisquito Creek, May 1861 was a landmark--groundbreaking for the railroad. On Oct. 18, 1863 the first train traveled from San Francisco to Mayfield along the San Francisco and San Jose Railway. The line was bought by the Southern Pacific in 1868.
The railroad provided wealthy San Francisco barons faster transportation to their country homes--a round-trip ticket from Menlo Park to San Francisco cost $2.50 and a one-way ride took 80 minutes, compared to the stagecoach, which took four hours from Redwood City to San Francisco.
The Menlo Park train station, as it stands today, is one of the earliest railroad stations built in California. It opened for business in August 1867.
[edit] Early 1900s
In the early part of the 1900s, Menlo Park saloons attracted many Stanford students who congregated there during downtimes. Palo Alto remained a dry city in accordance with Governor Stanford's instruction.
But despite the number of saloons, Menlo Park before World War I was a quiet town where life revolved around agriculture and the railroad.
The town was a center for strawberries, grown in fields that stretched out from Santa Cruz Avenue to the creek. Menlo Park farmers also grew violets to sell in San Francisco. Many of the fields were located on the Hopkins estate, the same land on which Menlo Park's Civic Center now stands. The violet is now the official city flower.
The bigger estates, like one owned by Timothy Hopkins, which stretched from Menlo Park across the creek to Palo Alto, included their own orchards, dairies and gas manufacturing plants, among other conveniences.
Understandably, estates like Timothy Hopkins' employed many workers, many of whom settled in Menlo Park. But it took the First World War and the arrival of Camp Fremont to really spur growth in Menlo Park.
