Hidden Villa
The price was remarkable even by 1920s standards: $10 in gold coin and a $20,000 mortgage for 1,400 acres of foothill wilderness in Los Altos Hills. Frank and Josephine Duveneck paid it in 1923, acquiring a property whose main building, the White House, dated to the 1860s when it served as a stagecoach stop halfway between San Jose and Pescadero. The Duvenecks transformed this former transit point into something more permanent and more radical -- a place where the boundaries between social classes, races, and ideas about the outdoors would be deliberately blurred. Hidden Villa became the West's first American youth hostel in 1937 and the nation's first multicultural children's summer camp in 1945, at a time when such mixing was anything but ordinary.
Refuge in the Foothills
Frank Boott Duveneck came from artistic stock -- his father was the painter Frank Duveneck, his mother the painter Elizabeth Boott. Josephine was the daughter of industrialist Henry Melville Whitney. Together they built a life on the wooded slopes of Black Mountain that mixed privilege with purpose. Frank founded the Loma Prieta Chapter of the Sierra Club in 1933 with 53 charter members, only the fourth chapter in the club's history. Both Duvenecks cofounded Friends Outside, a support group for prisoners and their families. When Japanese Americans returned from internment camps after World War II, the Duvenecks sheltered them at Hidden Villa. In the 1950s, they provided safe harbor for Cesar Chavez as he organized farm workers in the surrounding agricultural valleys. The farm was not a retreat from the world so much as a staging ground for engaging with its injustices.
Where Creek Trails Meet Classrooms
Today Hidden Villa operates as a nonprofit educational organization on land comprising the upper Adobe Creek watershed. Thirty thousand visitors come each year for environmental education programs, summer camps, and community workshops on sustainability and animal husbandry. The farm complex sits in a valley at about 500 feet above sea level, nearly surrounded by open space including Monte Bello Open Space Preserve and Rancho San Antonio Open Space Preserve. The Creek Trail follows the east fork of Adobe Creek for two miles through a wooded canyon where water still flows year-round. From there, hikers can connect to the Black Mountain Trail, climbing steeply for three miles to the 2,800-foot summit. Steelhead trout once ran these creeks; reports from 1877 and 1898 documented them in Adobe Creek, and a 1909 land office brochure promoted Los Altos for its "never-failing mountain trout stream, trout caught a few feet from kitchen doors."
A Legacy Planted Deep
Hidden Villa was incorporated as The Trust for Hidden Villa in 1960, fulfilling the Duvenecks' wish to preserve the land permanently. As Josephine wrote in her memoir Life on Two Levels, the family agreed that "a large part of the wilderness area, including the creek and its pristine watershed, should be dedicated at our death to public use as a permanent wild life sanctuary." The community-supported agriculture program now supplies local organic produce to neighboring communities and service organizations. Children visit with farm animals, families explore the gardens, and hikers lose themselves on eight miles of trails. In a region where technology companies have reshaped the landscape beyond recognition, Hidden Villa endures as a living reminder that some of the most valuable things on the Peninsula cannot be coded, patented, or IPO'd.
From the Air
Hidden Villa is at 37.35°N, 122.16°W in the Los Altos Hills foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The farm complex is nestled in a valley visible from low altitude. Nearby airports include Palo Alto Airport (KPAO) and San Jose International (KSJC). Look for the open meadows along Adobe Creek at the base of Black Mountain.