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Drivers and pedestrians on Marshall Street in downtown Redwood City pulled out their cellphones as a crane hoisted horse-drawn carriages into the air. After 50 years in storage, a collection of historic carriages were moved to their new home in the San Mateo County History Museum’s Taube Family Carriage House and Automobile Gallery on Aug. 17.
It was a rare sight, as modern gas-powered machinery lifted each horsedrawn conveyance to the second floor of the vehicles’ new permanent home, set to open to the public on Nov. 7.
The $25 million museum expansion has been in the works for eight years, said Mitch Postel, president of the San Mateo County Historical Association.
A majority of the 13 carriages in the museum’s collection belonged to Lurline Matson Roth, the former owner of the opulent Filoli estate in Woodside, while others came from the Holbrook-Palmer estate in Atherton. After Roth donated Filoli to the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1975, the San Mateo County History Museum was able to acquire the estate’s collection of Brewster carriages. They have been kept in storage ever since.
“We’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time,” he said. “After all these years, it’s a story of five decades to bring those carriages out and to be able to show them.”
All of the carriages in the collection are at least 120 years old. The vehicles include a horse-drawn buggy, omnibus carriage and an oil wagon. In their new home in the museum, the walls behind the carriages will be decorated with gilded Victorian mirrors acquired from estates across the county.
Sheedy Drayage Co. workers prepare to lift a carriage to the second floor of the Taube Family Carriage House and Automobile Gallery in Redwood City on Aug. 17, 2026. Photo by Seeger Gray. 
Sheedy Drayage Co. workers prepare lift a restored late-19th-century carriage to the second floor of the Taube Family Carriage House and Automobile Gallery in Redwood City on Aug. 17, 2026. Photo by Seeger Gray. 
Sheedy Drayage Co. workers place a restored late-19th-century carriage in the second floor of the Taube Family Carriage House and Automobile Gallery in Redwood City on Aug. 17, 2026. Photo by Seeger Gray. 
Sheedy Drayage Co. workers lift a box containing the ribcage of a Neoparadoxia repenningi skeleton onto the second floor of the Taube Family Carriage House and Automobile Gallery before moving it to a future natural history gallery in Redwood City on Aug. 17, 2026. The skeleton of the extinct hippo-like animal was found during the construction of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Photo by Seeger Gray.
Postel said he hopes the new exhibit will “paint a picture about what the Peninsula was like in the late 19th and early 20th century.” In the 1900s, San Mateo County had about 12,000 residents and was the “slowest growing county in all of the Bay Area,” according to Postel.
Within such a small population, hundreds of individuals worked on the many estates that used these carriages. Postel said these workers represent the “original diversity story,” emigrating from countries such as Ireland, China, Italy, Japan and Portugal who worked on the grounds as servants, coachmen, stable hands and gardeners.
“It’s a big part of who we are,” he said.
The biggest carriage that will be displayed is a 2,400 pound Light Park Drag, which had to be disassembled before being moved upstairs. This vehicle was used as a “party vehicle” for group travel and is equipped with a tailgate, typically used to attend polo tournaments and horse races with friends and family. The back of the carriage also includes a compartment for an ice chest with room for champagne bottles and cocktail glasses on top.
The completion of the exhibit was driven largely by the Taube Family, who contributed the first $7 million donation to the project. Tad Taube was a Stanford alum and local philanthropist who died in 2025. His contributions also supported the Peninsula Jewish Community Center, building of Stanford’s Taube Family Tennis Stadium and Taube Pavilion at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital.
Other donors of $5,000 or more will be acknowledged on a plaque that will be displayed within the Carriage House at the entrance of the museum.
The opening date on Nov. 7 will not only celebrate the new Carriage House, but will also feature the restored historic Lathrop House and the unveiling of a new natural history gallery, featuring the cast of a 14-million-year-old sea mammal called the Neoparadoxia repenningi.
The San Mateo County History Museum is located at 2200 Broadway in Redwood City.
