Menlo Park Gate

From Palo Alto Wiki

The Menlo Park Gate was erected at the common entrance of two houses built by Irish brothers-in-law Dennis Oliver and D.C. McGlynn (the founders of Menlo Park). The tall wooden gate had three arches on which the name "Menlo Park" was inscribed in foot-high letters, along with the date, 1854.

The men named their new homes after their old hometown, 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.