If walls could talk: Old Woodside Store Day opens window into the county’s past

Mitch Postel, president of the San Mateo County Historical Association, said his organization has been responsible for preserving the store, one of the oldest still standing in San Mateo County, since 1979. Built in 1854 by one of the area’s first entrepreneurs, Robert O. Tripp, the wooden structure was one of the only stagecoach stops and stores between San Francisco and San Jose for several decades when logging was an economic driver of activity in the area, said Postel.

“It was a real community meeting place,” he said.

Also known as R.O. Tripp, the former Massachusetts dentist had initially come to California in search of gold and better health and ended up becoming a catalyst for the logging industry that boomed in Woodside and Redwood City in the late 1800s, said Postel. Trip was a true entrepreneur, Postel said, expanding his business to provide services for those flocking to the area. He provided clothing and dry goods at the store central to where they logged old growth redwood trees later used to build many of San Francisco’s buildings.

Postel guesses there may have been more people living in the tree-covered hills and mountains surrounding Woodside than there are now, making the store a “town center” for an area once dotted with logging camps. Though Postel also speculates the store may have been built as a temporary structure, with uneven wooden planks as floorboards, the building has withstood the test of time.

“I’m sure when [Tripp] built it in 1854, he wouldn’t have had a clue it’d still be around today,” said Postel.

It’s now a place where visitors and school groups can stop by on select days of the week to try their hand at cutting logs and browse shelves of historic merchandise just like their counterparts might have more than 100 years ago.

Though the county bought the store from Tripp’s daughter in the 1940s, the quest to preserve the store as a window into the past ramped up in the ’70s and ’80s, said Postel.

“It really took detective work to figure out what to do,” he said.

A key piece of the puzzle proved to be Tripp’s meticulous bookkeeping, giving those with the San Mateo County Historical Association detailed records showing the kind of merchandise Tripp stocked at his store. Postel said historians could locate all but one of Tripp’s store ledgers and, combined with historic brand information stored at the state archives, they were able to recreate the labels one might have found on canned goods in the 1880s. Old photos and a few firsthand accounts of store visits from older residents who could remember visiting the store as children filled in some missing pieces of how the store looked when loggers were its target customers.

Now the store’s customers are school children and anyone looking for a better understanding of what life was like at another time. On Sunday, the store will also be home to tools loggers and their families might have used, from butter churns to old washing machines, said Carmen Blair, deputy director of the San Mateo County Historical Association.

“To me, Old Woodside Store Day is a glimpse into how people used to live,” she said.

Blair said her favorite part about exploring Tripp’s legendary past has been comparing advertisements for his store, where he claimed he would procure anything a customer might want, with his ledgers, showing which items were popular at the time.

The historic Woodside Store will be open to the public Sunday, May 7, between noon and 4 p.m. at 3300 Tripp Road for visitors to compete in a seed spitting contest, cleave shingles with a mallet and froe, as well as make dolls, among other activities. Visit historysmc.org or call (650) 299-0104 for more information.

anna@smdailyjournal.com

(650) 344-5200 ext. 102