The History of Muir Woods
Muir Woods didn’t survive by accident. It’s one of the last old-growth coastal redwood forests in the Bay Area because a handful of people spent their own money to keep the loggers out, and then handed the land to the federal government before anyone could change their minds.
Before the Park
Coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) once covered a much wider range. Ancestors of the species grew across large parts of what’s now the continental United States. By the time Europeans arrived in California, the redwood belt had already contracted to a narrow strip of fog-fed coastline running from southern Oregon down into Big Sur, roughly two million acres of old growth.
Nineteenth-century logging took most of it. The tall, straight, rot-resistant wood was ideal for building San Francisco, and the forests closest to the Bay were cut first. Redwood Canyon, on the steep slopes of Mount Tamalpais, was one of the few accessible groves that somehow stayed standing. It was hard to reach, and the local landowners kept putting the sale off.
William Kent’s 1905 Purchase
In 1905, William Kent, a Marin County businessman and later U.S. Congressman, bought 611 acres of Redwood Canyon for $45,000. Friends told him he’d overpaid. He bought it anyway, specifically to keep it from being logged.
Two years later, the North Coast Water Company filed to condemn the canyon, flood it, and turn it into a reservoir for Sausalito. Kent’s response was to take the piece of the property with the biggest trees on it, 295 acres (the area named in Roosevelt’s proclamation), and donate it to the federal government. Under the 1906 Antiquities Act, the president could protect donated land by declaring it a national monument, which couldn’t be condemned by a water utility.
“This is the very best tree-lover’s monument that could possibly be found in all the forests of the world.”
John Muir, in a letter to William Kent, February 6, 1908
The 1908 Designation
President Theodore Roosevelt signed the proclamation on January 9, 1908, creating Muir Woods National Monument. Roosevelt initially wanted to name the monument after Kent. Kent refused and asked that it be named for the naturalist John Muir, who had been writing and organizing to protect Western forests for decades. Muir later wrote to Kent to thank him for the gift and for insisting on the name.
Early Visitation
Word spread fast. By the 1910s the monument was drawing tens of thousands of visitors a year, most of them arriving by ferry from San Francisco and then by the Mount Tamalpais and Muir Woods Railway, the famous “crookedest railroad in the world,” which climbed the mountain and dropped hikers at the edge of the canyon.
Automobiles eventually displaced the railway. A wildfire in July 1929 forced the final passenger run that October, and scrappers pulled up the tracks in 1930.
Muir Woods Today
The monument now protects 554 acres of coastal Marin County, including 240 acres of old-growth redwood. It sits inside the larger Golden Gate National Recreation Area, managed by the National Park Service with support from the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy.
Annual visitation runs over one million, which is why the park now requires parking and shuttle reservations. The same accessibility that made Muir Woods a tourist destination in 1913 is what threatens it today. That’s why reservation systems, shuttle buses, and Leave No Trace practice matter as much as Kent’s original purchase did.