The Gift to the Adopted Son

Mrs. Mark Hopkins evidently bought the Latham property to present as a gift to her adopted son, Timothy Hopkins, Esq. who received it as a wedding present from "mother" Hopkins upon his marriage to Mary Kellogg. He renamed the magnificent mansion Sherwood Hall and added extensive ornamental and horticultural gardens to the estate grounds, including a commercial nursery which raised many varieties of flowers for the Mark Hopkins Hotel (San Francisco) and for the industry, plus large orchards flanked with industrial fruit-drying barns. for national and international sale. Hopkins firmly established an agricultural dynasty with his "Sherwood Hall Nursery" here (later called Sunset Feed and Plant Company) which produced internationally acclaimed Parma violets, chrysanthemums, hay, grain, poultry, eggs, dried fruit and other farm goods from its 9000 fruit trees and 25 huge glass greenhouses. (Some fruit trees can still be found on the USGS campus today). Tall water towers stood as sentinels useful to locals for geographic references. The living grounds included an eclectic mix of a traffic circle fountain garden, a towered Victorian style barn carriage house, and an Egyptian motif pool house.

This successful fellow was ignobly born in the state of Maine as the son of an Irish immigrant family named Nolan. His father Patrick Nolan (who had a job in Maine as an oilcloth worker) sought better fortune in goldfields of California, but unfortunately drowned just one day's sail out of New York. Tim's widowed mom luckily got work in the household of Mark Hopkins, and after Mark's death, widow Hopkins eventually adopted Timothy as her own and prepared to send him off to Harvard. Within two years, however, he got a job with Central Pacific (built by Hopkins, Huntington, Crocker, and Stanford) and he eventually rose to became treasurer of the company and its reorganization as the Southern Pacific Railroad. (He had no need to finish college.)

In addition to his important position in Southern Pacific, Tim also was industrious at directing the Wells Fargo Bank, Union Trust Company, Pacific Telephone & Telegraph and the Union Ice Company, as well as his "Sherwood Hall Nursery" in Menlo Park. Timothy Hopkins also bought 697.55 acres of land from Henry Seale on October 28, 1887 (with financial help from Leland Stanford) to cut up into tracts for Stanford University Housing. Timothy also served on the Board of Directors at Stanford University and founded the Hopkins Marine Lab at Pacific Grove. Tim and Mary lived at Sherwood Hall from 1888 to 1906, but had to move into their carriage barn when the mansion was rendered unlivable due to consequences of the Great Earthquake. The home was neither rebuilt nor removed in the ensuing years of Hopkins' ownership of the estate. Timothy Hopkins died in 1936, leaving behind wife Mary Kellogg Hopkins and daughter Lydia Kellogg Hopkins. The Hopkins family legacy covered ownership of the Menlo property between 1883 and 1941. The estate land was deeded to Stanford University after Mary's death.

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