El Palo Alto

El Palo Alto ('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 1085–1086 years old and stands 110 feet (34 m) 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

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