If you happen to be driving in Palo Alto down Page Mile Road, be
on the look out for a side street called Peter Coutts Road. This
street name is pretty much the only thing remaining of a mysterious
and some would even say romantic story set in Santa Clara County
during the late 19th century.
If you happen to be driving in Palo Alto down Page Mile Road, be on the look out for a side street called Peter Coutts Road. This street name is pretty much the only thing remaining of a mysterious and some would even say romantic story set in Santa Clara County during the late 19th century.
The strange tale starts in the small farm village of Mayfield. The town years later would be incorporated by the expanding city of Palo Alto and was located on what is now that Silicon Valley city’s California Avenue.
In the spring of 1875, everyone in Mayfield was puzzling over the identity of a handsome and aristocratic character who called himself Monsieur Peter Coutts.
Coutts had purchased the farm of Mayfield’s town founder William Paul, just west of the village. He christened it Ayrshire Farm, after the cattle he planned to raise there. He hired a hundred local men and set them to work building a grand estate including houses and chalets, a 50-foot-tall clock tower, stables for his racehorses, a race track (including viewing stands), a wine cellar, kennels for his beagles, and a dozen brick barns to house his cattle. Polite but reserved, Coutts never talked about his past, fueling speculation among the townspeople and farmers as to Monsieur Coutts’s true identity.
Among the estate’s prominent landmarks was a 30-foot-tall brick tower designed in the style of a Norman fortress. Unlike most Norman fortresses, however, it had no door or other obvious means of entrance or exit. Coutts hired Cornish miners to dig a two-mile network of irrigation tunnels leading to his prominent landmark.
No one in Mayfield could fathom the purpose of the structure they dubbed “Frenchman’s Tower.” Some speculated that it imprisoned Coutts’s wife, who had perhaps been driven insane by some horrible tragedy. And the tunnels might have been built so that Coutts could quickly escape from whatever pursuers were after him to retrieve the alleged gold he had stolen.
When all was ready, Coutts’s invalid wife Marie, his young son and daughter and a governess named Mlle. Eugenie Clogenson came to live with him in the nine-room “Escondite Cottage” (Spanish for “hiding place”).
Locals said (incorrectly) that it was fashioned after Marie Antoinette’s Le Petit Trianon in Versailles.
Work on the estate continued for the next six years. Coutts bought more property, expanding his farm to 1,242 acres and spending an astonishing $40,000 a year developing his cattle ranch. And then in 1880, with a sudden haste and no announced reason, Coutts and his family left his farm and returned to Europe. This mysterious departure only added to the mystery surrounding the enigmatic Frenchman.
Two years later, Senator Leland Stanford purchased the property for $140,000 to expand his own Palo Alto Farm, which would eventually, of course, become Stanford University. David Starr Jordan, the university’s first president, lived in Escondite Cottage, and the Stanfords often visited the home and pondered about the Frenchman who had lived there.
It wasn’t until the 1920s that Monsieur Coutts’s real identity was discovered. His real name was Paulin Caperon, and he had made a fortune banking in Paris. He had published an anti-royalist newspaper called La Liberte, and, facing the political wrath of Napoleon III, fled France for California. Here in Santa Clara County, he assumed his alternative identity which created so much fun speculative gossip among his neighbors.
His cottage is still located on Escondido Road in the setting of Stanford University. Much of his former farm now is the site of Silicon Valley’s high-tech corporations along Page Mill Road such as Hewlett-Packard. And in his memory, there is of course the now-suburban street named Peter Coutts Road.
Martin Cheek is a reporter for the Gilroy Dispatch. He is the author of ‘The Silicon Valley Handbook.’
