The things I go through for you. Today’s adventure required me to solve a mystery over 100 years old. Not only was there a threat of being shot on sight, but I nearly brushed against some poison oak while wearing shorts.

Peter Coutts’ tower

Just off Page Mill road near 280 in Palo Alto stands a lone and lonely castle tower, its crenellated parapet pointing to the blue summer sky.

According to a paragraph repeated in website after website, the tower was “reportedly built in the late 18th century by the Peninsula's celebrated French pioneer, Peter Coutts.” A little checking made me doubt this story, however. Peter Coutts didn’t even arrive in America until 1874 and so was unlikely to be building castles while his father was still in vitrio.

Cue the spooky music

Another thing all of the websites wanted me to know about him was that he was a “mysterious Frenchman.” Indeed, google “Peter Coutts” and the first entry you’ll find is “The Mysterious Peter Coutts.” Looking at some historical research that had been done on him, he seems to have been a French financier who fled to America after bad investments and the Franco-Prussian War. The other formidable fact I discovered is that this Frenchman tended to be snotty toward Americans until dinnertime, when he became a charming conversationalist. Quelle surprise.

As far as his tower, no one seemed to know what it was built for, the top contenders being (A) part of a castle, (B) a folly—that is, something built to satisfy an architectural fancy, or (C) something to keep his bricklayer busy during the off-season.

Indeed, it is said that, “whoever finally figures out the original purpose of Frenchman's Tower will get their 15 minutes of fame.”

Even the location was hard to decipher. It is given romantically as being “the banks of Matadero Creek,”  more specifically as “Old Page Mill Road, a quarter-mile off the Page Mill Road exit from Highway 280," and nerdishly as "37.39594400, -122.16237500."

Geo-tracking it down

Well, being more nerd than romantic, I typed in these latitude and longitude coordinates on Google Maps. In return I got an address on Jarvis Way, not Old Page Mill Road. Switching to satellite view quickly showed me there was no tower on Jarvis. But oh ho! Ah ha! What was that narrow ringlike shape a few hundred yards away to the east? I zoomed in and got my first overhead view of the tower, not on Jarvis, but on Old Page Mill. Someone had either slipped up or purposely put me onto the wrong fork in the road. How vaguely suspicious…

I typed the correct coordinates into my GPS and drove to Palo Alto to see the tower. Making sure to turn onto Old Page Mill Road from Page Mill, I wound my way for a quarter mile before sighting the tower to my right.

A warning

Parking on the other side of the road, I began walking up to a property across from the tower to get a little “local color” first. That's when I noticed a sign on the gate. “Warning. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.”

OK. Enough local color, I decided.

The tower

The tower itself was right at the edge of the road. Circular, roughly thirty feet tall, and made of brick, its gothic, arched windows were filled in with paler brick. For half its height visitors had carved their names into the face of the bricks. The top had crenellations, where I suppose archers could have knelt and safely fired their arrows down upon hapless Stanford bicyclists riding past.

A look around

The tower was fronted by a short wire fence that, fortunately, had no warning signs. Taking this as an invitation, I hopped it for a better look.

Walking clockwise around the tower I made my way toward the back, ducking under and around patches of poison oak. Although the windows on the tower have been bricked up, at the bottom of the tower was a small, ragged hole, perhaps 15 inches in diameter.

A look inside

Kneeling down, I could just peek inside the hole, but couldn’t fit through it. So, camera in hand, I extended my arm as far as I could inside the hole and began taking pictures.

This, I thought, was very stupid. Every teen horror movie ever made is clear on this point. As a middle-aged man, alone in the woods and clearly expendable as a plot device, I would never, ever want to put my entire arm inside a hole at the bottom of an abandoned castle tower.

But the pictures were worth it. The photos showed that inside the tower were the remains of a campfire and that the entire inner wall was painted with graffiti.

How did anyone fit in there and survive long enough to paint all that? My guess is that someone shoved their boy inside at 36 months, along with a bag of groceries, some cans of automotive spray paint, and instructions not to come back out until they’d learned to be a graffiti artist, hopefully before they were more than 15 inches wide.

A final discovery

I figured I’d learned all that I was going to, so I stood back up and dusted myself off. Working my way to the front again, I was about to ease back over the fence when I noticed a large rock at the far side of the tower’s base, nearly covered by branches. Looking closer I saw that the rock contained a plaque on its front, weathered green with age. Apparently no one besides me had ever seen this plaque before. At least no one with a web page.

It said the following:

FRENCHMAN’S TOWER

BUILT BY PETER COUTTS AS PART OF IRRIGATION SYSTEM BEGUN IN 1875, DECLARED COUNTY AND STATE “POINT OF INTEREST”—1969.

PLAQUE DONATED BY COMMITTEE FOR GREEN FOOTHILLS

Oh…that mystery.

If you go

Frenchman’s Tower
2050 Old Page Mill Road
Location map