Taylor was born in Saugerties, New York, in 1827, a town where his father had worked in the paper trade. The lure of California gold pulled him west, and by 1853 he was prospecting at Hawkins Bar in Tuolumne County. He did well enough to ship just over 21 pounds of gold dust to his San Francisco bankers, netting him $5,692 - a substantial sum at the time. But Taylor was a businessman, not a miner, and he recognized that California's booming newspaper industry needed paper more reliably than it needed another prospector. He bought 100 acres along Lagunitas Creek in western Marin County from Mexican land grantee Rafael Garcia and put his father's trade knowledge to work. In 1856, the Pioneer Paper Mill began operations, the first of its kind on the West Coast.

The Pioneer Paper Mill Company turned San Francisco's refuse into a commodity. Scrap paper, old rags, rope, and jute arrived from the city; finished newsprint traveled back. The mill supplied publications that were shaping California's identity - the Daily Alta California, the San Francisco Morning Call, and the Daily Evening Bulletin all printed on Taylor's paper. A community called Taylorville grew up around the operation, with workers' housing, a schoolhouse, and the rhythmic clatter of the mill's machinery echoing through the redwood canyon. Lagunitas Creek, which the locals called Paper Mill Creek for decades afterward, powered the whole enterprise. The creek's name would outlast the mill itself.

When the narrow-gauge North Pacific Coast Railroad punched through the canyon in 1875, Taylor saw opportunity beyond pulp. City dwellers from San Francisco could now reach his remote valley in hours rather than days. He built the Camp Taylor Resort alongside the tracks, complete with a hotel called the Azalia, a dance pavilion, and tent camping along the creek. Guests swam in the millpond, fished, hunted, and explored the surrounding redwood groves. It was one of the first places in the United States to offer camping as organized recreation - decades before the national park system would popularize the idea. For a generation of San Franciscans, a weekend at Camp Taylor meant train whistles, swimming holes, and the smell of redwoods.

Taylor died on January 22, 1886, at the age of 58, leaving his family to manage the mill and the resort. Neither survived the economic turmoil that followed. The Panic of 1893 swept through California's economy, and the Taylor family lost both the paper mill and the resort. The mill fell silent. The hotel eventually decayed. The canyon began its slow return to wilderness, though the foundations of Taylor's enterprise remained visible among the ferns and second-growth redwoods. In 1946, the state of California acquired the property, and Samuel P. Taylor State Park opened to the public - a campground again, just as Taylor had intended, though now the guests arrive by car rather than narrow-gauge train.

Today Lagunitas Creek flows through the park much as it did when it powered Taylor's mill. Hikers on the Pioneer Trail walk past foundation stones from the original operation, and interpretive signs explain how one man harnessed a creek to supply an entire coast with paper. The old-growth redwoods that Taylor left standing still shade the canyon floor. Coho salmon and steelhead trout run the creek in winter, threading through the same pools where Victorian-era vacationers once swam. The park sits roughly 40 miles north of San Francisco in the hills between the Pacific shore and the inland valleys - close enough to the city that Taylor's original logic still holds. People still come here to escape.