Abraham Griffith was born in 1822 in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, England. He crossed the Atlantic in 1844, landing in New York City, where he spent five years working as a store clerk and waiting for his chance. When news of the California Gold Rush reached the East Coast, Griffith secured passage as a stoker on the steamship Panama through a connection to the Aspinwall family, founders of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. The ship broke down five days out and limped back to New York. Griffith tried again the following season, this time aboard the steamer Empire City to the Isthmus of Panama and then the steamer Oregon to San Francisco. He arrived to find a territory in the grip of gold fever. On the night of October 2, he camped on the bank of Cache Creek at the settlement called Cacheville, helped an old man named Thomas Cochran build a hut for a country tavern, and then headed north to the Trinity mines.

Mining treated Griffith roughly. He saved about $500 working the Trinity diggings, only to have the money stolen by a fellow traveler. Disgusted, he returned to Cacheville and took a job cooking for Cochran, who soon absconded to Australia, leaving debts behind and nothing but a letter from San Francisco as farewell. Griffith pivoted. He managed a hotel with William Hammack, then clerked in a store for $75 a month. In 1854, he married Mary Rush, who had crossed the plains that year. By 1855, Griffith had bought out Hammack, forming the partnership Hutton and Griffith. When the county seat moved from Washington to Cacheville in 1857, Griffith was already one of the town's leading merchants. He purchased the first brick store in town in 1861, served as Postmaster, and became the local agent for the Wells Fargo Express Company, a position he held for sixteen years. Cacheville would eventually be renamed Yolo, but Griffith's imprint on the place was already permanent.

Griffith retired in 1880 with a family of eight children, though his daughter Jennie had died at age three in 1868. In September 1885, while he was in San Francisco with his wife and four youngest sons, his house in Cacheville burned to the ground. He had no insurance. Rather than retreat, the 63-year-old Griffith responded by building something grander. In 1886, he erected a High Victorian Italianate residence on 20 acres along the bank of Cache Creek. The mansion featured prominent bay windows, keystone-arched sash windows, scrolled brackets at the eaves, and classical Corinthian columns. It was, and remains, the grandest home in town, sitting on the edge of the commercial district where Griffith had made his name. The residence stayed in the Griffith family until 1935, when it was sold to the Hugo Maassen family, who reportedly never occupied the upper floors.

The 1998 pool excavation brought UC Davis anthropologists to the property for six days. Volunteers and undergraduate students spent 240 hours collecting materials from what turned out to be a significant Patwin archaeological site. Among the finds were delicate chert drills, important because they are believed to have been used to perforate marine clam shells for making beads, the currency of Patwin trade networks. Animal bones, cutting tools, and human skeletal remains also emerged. The anthropology department identified the most likely descendants of the people whose remains had been disturbed and brought them into contact with the property owners. The descendants permitted the excavation to continue and allowed UC Davis to study the artifacts for an additional year, after which all skeletal remains and associated grave goods were reburied in a secluded area of the property where they would not be disturbed again.

A Bay Area family eventually purchased the mansion and undertook a fifteen-year restoration, returning the residence to its original Victorian character while adding modern utilities. The home remains a private family residence today on 14 acres of the original parcel. From the air, the Griffith Mansion is part of a cluster of historic buildings in the Woodland area that includes the Gable Mansion, the Gibson Mansion, the Woodland Opera House, and the Yolo County Courthouse. Together they form a pocket of nineteenth-century architecture preserved in the agricultural flatlands of the Sacramento Valley. But the Griffith Mansion carries something the others do not: the knowledge that its foundations rest on ground that was significant long before Abraham Griffith arrived from England, before the Gold Rush remade California, before Cacheville had a name. The Patwin artifacts now rest quietly beneath the property, reburied where they belong, a layer of history that predates the mansion by centuries.