Major Events for the Barron Park Neighborhood, Palo Alto, California, USA

• American Indian site: On Matadero Creek on the VA Hospital property. More likely a seasonal encampment than a permanent settlement.
• Santa Clara Mission: Cattle were butchered along Matadero Creek, hence its name which means place of slaughter/killing. Part of the reason for the choice of this site apparently was that the creek provided reasonable flows of water year-round (for both the humans and the cattle gathered there).
• Rancho Rincon de San Francisquito: In 1841, Governor Alvarado granted 8418 acres to Jose Pena, a retired Presidio artilleryman turned teacher.
• Rancho Santa Rita: In 1847, Don Secundino Robles and his brother Jose Teodoro exchanged their interest in the New Almaden cinnabar/quicksilver deposits (on Alamitos Creek) for the Rancho, which they renamed. (Cinnabar is the ore for quicksilver which is another name for mercury).
• Mayfield Farm: 250 acres of the Rancho were sold to pay taxes. This parcel is today Barron Park and the Stanford Research Park, and was purchased by Elisha Crosby and named Mayfield Farm.
• Wallis: Sarah and Joseph Wallis obtained Mayfield Farm after a legal action. They built an ornate mansion.
• Barron Park: In 1878, the farm was sold to mining magnate Edward Barron. He create elaborate gardens; some of the palms and magnolias can still be seen along Magnolia, La Selva, and Military Way.
• Driscoll Family Strawberry Farm and at least two dairy farms.
• Summer Cottages: Barron Park neighborhood was born in the booming 1920's as a summer colony for San Franciscans weary of fog and wind.
• Palo Alto: In 1975, the Barron Park residents voted to be annexed to the City of Palo Alto. Previously, the neighborhood had been an unincorporated island completely surrounded by Palo Alto.
  Note for researchers searching databases: Because Barron Park was a separate entity for so long, it has its own code (04016) in Codes for Named Populated Places: Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 55-3 (see the section for California) from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), formerly the National Bureau of Standards (NBS). Information pre-dating annexation (and possibly even after) may be stored under this code (rather than the code for Palo Alto).