El Palo Alto (Spanish: 'the tall stick') is a coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) located on the banks of San Francisquito Creek in Palo Alto, California, a city in the San Francisco Bay Area. The namesake of the city and a historical landmark, El Palo Alto is years old and stands tall.
Before European arrival, the land around El Palo Alto was home to the Ohlone Native Americans. Local folklore holds that El Palo Alto was a rest stop for the first European expedition that discovered San Francisco Bay, led by Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portolá in 1769. The tree became widely known with the early-1850s establishment of a highway between San Francisco and San Jose, and as a landmark along the San Francisco–San Jose railroad, construction of which passed the tree in 1863. In 1876, Leland Stanford, co-founder of Stanford University along with his wife Jane Lathrop Stanford, purchased land near El Palo Alto.
Early images and accounts indicate that El Palo Alto once had two trunks. It lost one trunk before 1883—the exact date is unknown—perhaps due to heavy rainfall and erosion of the riverbank. Fearing the tree's total loss, Leland Stanford directed that the riverbank be reinforced with a wooden bulkhead, which was replaced with concrete abutments in 1904 and again in 1911. Coal soot from steam locomotives passing below the tree suffocated the leaves of the tree's upper limbs; nearby wells lowered the water table, and by the late 1920s the tree was declared moribund. Although it has decreased in stature by some since the late 1800s, El Palo Alto was ultimately saved by the continuous preservation efforts of the city, local arborists, Stanford University, and Southern Pacific (the owner of the adjacent railroad); a 1997 appraisal concluded that the tree would "persevere and grow for centuries to come". El Palo Alto is featured prominently on the City of Palo Alto logo and the Stanford University seal, and is recognized by the National Arborist Association and International Society of Arboriculture as a tree of historical importance.
Name and background El Palo Alto is a coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens), a giant and long-lived tree species only found near the North American Pacific coast. The redwood has been California's official state tree since 1937. The world's tallest trees are coast redwoods, with the record holder, Hyperion, reaching . El Palo Alto is not so tall, at about , down from in the 19th century. At years, The age was determined accurately in 1955 with an increment borer. nor is El Palo Alto particularly old; the longest-lived redwoods may approach 2,500 years in age. Although today there are thousands of redwoods in the city of Palo Alto, El Palo Alto is one of only a few not planted by humans. Redwoods generally require wet climates like those found close to the coast, but El Palo Alto is much further inland, close to Palo Alto's northern border with Menlo Park. The tree's location next to San Francisquito Creek provided it the necessary water to survive.
History El Palo Alto germinated around AD 940, when the San Francisco Peninsula was populated by the Ohlone people, one of the indigenous peoples of California. The tree is thus contemporaneous with the Viking Age, the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period in China, or the Fatimid Caliphate in the Islamic world.
Prior to European contact, the Ramaytush speaking subgroup of the Ohlone people lived near to the tree, in the village of Puichon. Portolá's expedition
Before conquest by Spanish missionaries in the 18th century, the land around El Palo Alto was home to the Ohlone. According to traditional history, El Palo Alto was the campsite of Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portolá's men between November 6 and 11, 1769. Portolá was traveling north up the California coast from Mexico in search of Monterey Bay, but failed to identify it. Nourished by Ohlone natives, the expedition continued north and on November 1 were greeted with the expanse of the San Francisco Bay. They traveled southwest and arrived at San Francisquito Creek on November 6, 1769, where they camped until November 11.
Visiting the bay in 1774, Father Francisco Palóu came upon a large tree on the creek, considered its location suitable for a new mission, and erected a wooden cross near it. His diary entry indicated the location of Portolá's camp as nearby and is the tree's first appearance in writing. Font's map reproduced therein is also reproduced at In 1776, Juan Bautista de Anza and Father Pedro Font visited the tree and concluded the creek's flow was too unreliable, instead founding the Mission Santa Clara de Asís—modern day Santa Clara— to the southeast. Font measured the tree with a graphometer: fifty varas (137 feet; 42 m) high and 5.5 varas (15 feet; 3 m) around at the base, noting that soldiers had told him there were larger ones in the mountains. A 1777 map of the bay by Font indicated a large tree on San Francisquito Creek.
Most evidence in the past suggested that El Palo Alto was not the actual tree in Font's map or referenced by early Spanish diarists, who recorded their travels in detail but made no mention of a tree with twin trunks. Local historian Steve Staiger said that Portolá's camp may have been under a tree further downstream, later felled by a Spanish military engineer to make a bridge. Two candidates for the landmark tree, elsewhere along the creek, fell in 1852 and 1911.
Early landmark In July 1850, a highway from San Francisco in the north to San Jose to the south was ordered to be built. Previous travelers took narrow trails on horseback or slightly wider tracks on oxcart; it was joked that the road between the two cities was "three miles wide". The highway passed close to El Palo Alto and likely brought it to prominence. The tree was nearly cut down in 1850, but was saved by a timely shipment of lumber. "In 1849 it quickened the pulse and brought a sparkle to the eyes to stand at Porto Suelo and look from ocean to bay; or on Rincon hill on a clear day, when the Palos Colorados, the red trees of the valley, could be seen thirty-three miles off on the road to San Jose ... Several times the lumber men were about to cut down the Palos Colorados, the lone redwood trees from which the famous Palo Alto ranch has derived its name, but one thing and another hindered. The trees, however, would surely have been cut to save hauling had not the argonaut fleet arrived from New England early in the 1850 with lumber brought around the Horn ... In the winter of 1879 the sister tree, as if nature was conscious that its day of usefulness as a landmark had passed, was prostrated by a freshet."
El Palo Alto was first known as the Palos Colorados, roughly meaning 'red trees'. The earliest known reference to the name "Palo Alto" dates to 1853, and an 1856 official land survey labeled it the "Palo Alto Redwoods"; the name "Rancho of Palo Alto" was used as a disambiguation in 1857. Construction of a railroad by the San Francisco & San Jose Railroad Company, connecting San Francisco to San Jose, passed the tree in 1863, making it an obvious landmark for travelers. The section from San Francisco to "Big Tree Station" at the creek was inaugurated on October 7 that year. The Southern Pacific Transportation Company purchased the company in March 1868; the tree was featured in Southern Pacific advertising. Edward Vischer's Pictorial of California (1870) contains a drawing of the tree with two trunks, noting it to be "one of the very few instances of that mountain monarch [the redwood] being found in the open level country", and suggests that the tree originally had three trunks, describing it as "[t]wins, once a trio". Drawing itself is on page 185 (), titled "Evening passenger train on the San Francisco–San Jose railroad, crossing south San Francisquito Creek", dated 1864 to 1867.
Land transfers and the Stanfords
The land beneath and nearby the tree passed through various owners before becoming part of the city of Palo Alto, which did not yet exist. Some references state that the tree lay at the northwest corner of a Mexican land grant called Rancho Rinconada del Arroyo de San Francisquito, which spanned of oak trees and brush. This corner abutted Rancho San Francisquito to the west and Rancho de las Pulgas to the north. In 1835, the Rinconada grant was first given to Don Rafael Soto, whose father had settled in the de Anza expedition of 1775–76. Soto's widow inherited the grant in 1841. She entered a dispute with the US government—which acquired California as a state in 1850, after the Mexican–American War—over whether her claim was valid. Soto's heirs were finally declared the rightful owners in 1872, and gave the contractors who had represented them about of land as compensation; the heirs kept the other, northern part.
In 1876, parts of Rancho San Francisquito was purchased by Leland Stanford—who later founded Stanford University with his wife Jane Stanford—for his Palo Alto Stock Farm, a place for breeding and training horses. It would eventually grow to about . Following the death of their son in 1884, the Stanfords established a university in his honor on their land. In 1887, Soto's heirs sold their land to a good friend of Leland Stanford, Timothy Hopkins, who used it to develop the nearby town of University Park (see 1894 view). In particular, Hopkins acquired land near El Palo Alto, adjacent to Southern Pacific–owned land, that eventually became the city-owned El Palo Alto Park. Stanford University opened on October 1, 1891, with 440 students in attendance, and prompted the rapid growth of University Park. In 1894 it incorporated as the city of Palo Alto, a new name for which Stanford had a "great fondness". The first university seal, adopted in 1908, featured El Palo Alto prominently (although its artist Arthur Bridgman Clark drew a more "vigorous" tree, how El Palo Alto might have looked centuries earlier), adorned with to its left and to its right as a motto. Yet, even as the tree became so enmeshed with the university's branding, its position east of the railroad right of way confirms that there never was a time when El Palo Alto was on land owned by Leland Stanford.
One trunk falls
El Palo Alto had two trunks until some time between 1875 and 1882, when the north, more-curved trunk fell. The stump's rings were counted and gave an age of 967 years.
The exact date and cause of the trunk's falling had been thought to be unknown. A 1900 article in Palo Alto Live Oak dates the falling to the winter of 1879, blaming a freshet. A December 1882 article in The Sacramento Bee states: "Some years ago it had a companion tree, but the latter was undermined by a subterranean stream and fell to the ground." Local historian Guy Miller studied the matter for over two decades and estimated a date of 1885. Miller suggested that railroad records likely to contain definitive information were destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and subsequent fire. Letter is on page 345 of the compilation.
However, in a Palo Alto Historical Association talk on October 6, 2024, and in a follow up article in the Palo Alto Historical Association newsletter, Jeff Watt, a local Palo Alto electrical engineer, presented evidence that one of the twin trees likely fell in 1875. He presented a clipping from the Nov 20, 1875 issue of the San Mateo Times that referred to a large redwood growing next to the San Francisquito creek falling during the recent severe rainstorm (6 inches of rain). The article adds that "This tree was one of two giant redwoods growing near each other." Jeff also presented photographs showing only a single trunk for the tree after this date.