Matadero Creek

Matadero Creek is a stream originating in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains in Santa Clara County, California, United States. The creek flows in a northeasterly direction for 8mi until it enters the Palo Alto Flood Basin, where it joins Adobe Creek in the Palo Alto Baylands at the north end of the Mayfield Slough, just before its culmination in southwest San Francisco Bay. Matadero Creek begins in the city of Los Altos Hills, then traverses the Stanford University lands and Palo Alto.HistoryMatadero Creek was originally called Arroyo del Matadero on maps from the 1830s and 1840s, and matadero means slaughtering place in Spanish. On the 1862 Allardt Map of the San Francisco and San Jose Railroad, Matadero Creek is denoted as Crosby's Creek. In 1853, Elisha Crosby bought a 250-acre parcel of Rancho Santa Rita, really Rancho Rincon de San Francisquito, from the Robles family, and founded Mayfield Farm, but she lost it only 3 years later. On the March 5, 1863 map "Plat of the Rancho Rincon de San Francisquito", it is denoted as Matadero Creek. On the Palo Alto Topo Map of 1899, it was referred to as Madera Creek, a name which suggests its prior value as a source of timber (madera in Spanish).In 1875 French financier Jean Baptiste Paulin Caperon, better known as Peter Coutts, purchased land in Mayfield and four other parcels around three sides of today's College Terrace - more than a thousand acres extending from today's Page Mill Road to Serra Street and from El Camino Real to the foothills. Coutts named his property Ayrshire Farm. His fanciful brick 50 foot tall brick tower near Matadero Creek likely marked the south corner of his property. Leland Stanford started buying land in the area in 1876 for a horse farm, called the Palo Alto Stock Farm. Stanford bought Ayrshire Farm in 1882.