106 PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM {landmark} words by ANDREA GEMMET • photography by ROBB MOST charles brown’s sawmill Everybody knows good ol’ Charlie Brown from Peanuts cartoons, but Charles Brown remains something of a mystery. Charles earned his place in local history by building the Peninsula’s first sawmill in 1847, on the banks of Alambique Creek in Woodside. His nearby home, a seldomseen adobe house tucked away on private property, dates back to 1835 and is the oldest manmade structure still standing in San Mateo County. If you’ve driven along Portola Road and noticed a stately California Historic Landmark monument, then you’ve been just a few hundred yards from the site of the long-gone sawmill. Charles (who was also known as Carlos Moreno) was born in New York but relocated to Alta California when he jumped ship in San Francisco after arriving in 1829 on the whaler Alvine. A lot of details of his life are hard to pin down, as he was a teller of tales who gave conflicting accounts of his past and was described as “a restless, bombastic man, who was a hopeless speculator,” according to a short, wartsand-all biography by Joan Levy in the San Mateo County Historical Association’s archives. Charles’ first sawmill was a bust—it relied on water power from the creek, but he didn’t realize that Peninsula creeks tend to dry up in the summer. By the time a steam-powered sawmill replaced it a year later, Charles had moved on. In 1850, he left the area and later turned up near Lake Merced, where this rolling stone finally decided to gather some moss. After marrying a widow in the area, Charles lived out the rest of his life on her family’s land and died there in 1896. HISTORIC IMAGES COURTESY: SAN MATEO COUNTY HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION COLLECTION ABOVE: An untitled portrait of Charles Brown from the mid- to late-1800s by Silas Selleck; Brown’s residence in Woodside on July 28, 1850 by William H. Dougal.
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