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When the movers and shakers in high-tech Silicon Valley are looking for a home, Portola Valley offers a peaceful ambience rare on this side of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Its remoteness, multi-million-dollar prices and restrictive zoning make it a natural shelter from suburban sprawl.
During the gold rush of the 1850s, Portola Valley apparently offered another kind of shelter: to Chilean prospectors who turned to charcoal making after being driven out of Northern California’s gold fields by racist and occasionally vicious white competitors.
Portola Valley’s willow trees, the basis for charcoal, were “as thick as hairs on a dog’s back,” according to San Mateo County historian Alan K. Brown, a claim backed up by town historian Nancy Lund. Indeed, Sausal Creek is named after the Spanish word for willow.
The Chileans lived in five or six small one-story houses on the 13,000-acre estate of Maximo Martinez, the original landholder in Portola Valley, Ms. Lund said.
One of those houses — Portola Valley’s oldest, said former mayor Jon Silver — sits beside Portola Road just south of the Spring Down Equestrian Center, its roof sunken and its windows boarded.
This “Chilean woodchoppers house” is not in its original location, Mr. Silver said, but it has acquired new friends who want to rescue it from an uncertain future.
He is planning a campaign to find it a secure home and to raise funds to evaluate its framing, perhaps move it if it can safely be moved, and rehabilitate it. “I think these are all surmountable problems, but they’re big ones,” Mr. Silver acknowledged.
The idea of a campaign came to him after learning the house’s history from Ms. Lund, he said. He and two friends “were aghast” when they learned that its days on the former Jelich Ranch could be numbered, though its fate is in the hands of the Town Council.
The house is protected by the ranch’s conditional use permit. The owners, Phil and Cindie White, would like to donate the house to the town and maybe have it moved to public land, said Deputy Town Planner Tom Vlasic.
Hoping to save something of the house but skeptical of its structural viability, the council has talked about building a historical echo near the Historic Schoolhouse. The identical structure — as viewed from the street — would reuse the original redwood siding and serve as the Town Center’s bathroom.
“The restroom solution is a reasonable and defensible way to go,” Mr. Silver said. “If we can do nothing better, I certainly would support it.”
A piece of history
“Chileans were among the first to arrive in the gold fields when the word spread of the big discovery,” Ms. Lund said in recounting a story by Mr. Brown, the county historian. “However, they were driven from the gold country in short order by extreme prejudice. Unfortunately they were unable to get home because the Bay was clogged with abandoned ships whose crews were searching for gold themselves.”
“This piece of history should not be lightly cast aside,” Mr. Silver said. “This home was a place where one or more Chileans found sanctuary during a time of persecution.”
