Woodside goes from redwood lumber to Filoli gardens

Woodside is a small Peninsula town with a big time span packed into its hills. The area was home to Ohlone and Costanoan people long before the town grew around roads and mills. Later, redwood logging helped feed San Francisco’s growth, with lumber dragged by ox teams to Redwood Creek and floated toward the bay.

By 1855, Woodside had at least eight sawmills and one shingle mill. Dr. Robert Orville Tripp and M. A. Parkhurst opened the Woodside Store on King’s Mountain Road, and that store served people from places as far apart as San Mateo and Half Moon Bay. The preserved store is a good reminder that Woodside was once a practical stop in the timber country, long before its quieter residential feel took over.

As the old mills faded, farms, small cattle ranches, vineyards, and country estates became part of the valley. In the 1880s, wealthy San Francisco families began building retreats here. That shift is still easy to feel. Woodside has old roads, wooded canyons, horse trails, and a village center that sits close to much larger Silicon Valley cities without feeling like them.

Filoli shows the estate side of that change. The house was built in 1917, later opened to the public in 1975, and now covers 654 acres with a 54,000-plus square-foot Georgian Revival house, formal gardens, an orchard, natural lands, and trails. Filoli also shares the deeper story of the Lamchin people of the Ramaytush Ohlone and Rancho Canada de Raymundo.

Woodside is interesting because so much sits in the same valley. A person can see a museum store from the logging era, a small town hall setting, old rural roads, and one of the Bay Area’s best-known public estates, all in the same valley.