Homesite of Sarah Wallis, Mayfield Farm
Palo Alto, Santa Clara County, California
Marker Inscription
Homesite of Sarah Wallis Mayfield Farm Sarah Armstrong Wallis (1825–1905) was a pioneer in the campaign for women's voting rights. In 1870 she was elected president of California's first statewide suffrage organization which in 1873 incorporated as the California State Woman Suffrage Education Association. The home she built on this site, Mayfield Farm was a center of suffrage activities attracting state and national leaders such as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Ulysses S. Grant. California Registered Historical Landmark No. 969 Plaque placed by the State Department of Parks and Recreation in cooperation with the Women's Heritage Museum of Palo Alto and the City of Palo Alto, October 11, 1986.
Erected by California State Department of Parks and Recreation
The Story
On this Palo Alto ground stood Mayfield Farm, the home Sarah Armstrong Wallis built in the years after California statehood. A committed reformer, Wallis was elected in 1870 to lead California's first statewide suffrage organization, and her parlor became a gathering place for the movement's leading figures. In an era when women could not vote, the farm hosted national voices for the cause and helped knit California into the broader campaign for the ballot.
Why it matters
Sarah Wallis carried the national women's-suffrage struggle to the Pacific Coast decades before ratification, making this homesite a landmark in the long fight to extend American democracy to women.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
This ground in what is now Palo Alto tells a story that unfolds across the late nineteenth century, through the Gilded Age and into the modern era. California was a young state, transformed almost overnight by the Gold Rush and statehood, and still figuring out what kind of society it would become. Onto that fresh landscape, pioneers built farms, homes, and new institutions from the ground up.
It was also an age of great reform movements. Across the country, and increasingly on the Pacific Coast, women were organizing to claim a voice in public life — above all, the right to vote. In an era when women were largely shut out of formal politics, that campaign was long, patient, and often waged from parlors and farmhouses rather than statehouses.
Here, on a farm built after California statehood, those two threads — frontier homemaking and national reform — came together.
People & events
Sarah Armstrong Wallis (1825–1905) was a pioneer of the campaign for women's voting rights. In 1870 she was elected president of California's first statewide suffrage organization, which in 1873 incorporated as the California State Woman Suffrage Educational Association — making her a founding leader of the movement in her state.
The home she built on this site, Mayfield Farm, became a center of suffrage activity. It drew state and national figures to its rooms, including the movement's towering leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as well as Ulysses S. Grant. A working farm doubling as a hub for a national cause is a vivid image of how this movement actually operated — through hospitality, conversation, and the steady building of a network.
The marker itself was placed in October 1986 by the State Department of Parks and Recreation, together with the Women's Heritage Museum of Palo Alto and the City of Palo Alto, recognizing the site as California Registered Historical Landmark No. 969.
Its place in the American story
The long fight to extend the vote to women was national in scope but was won farmhouse by farmhouse, town by town, and state by state. Places like Mayfield Farm show how a coast-to-coast movement was knit together: leaders traveled, local organizers hosted them, and far-flung communities were drawn into a single cause.
That Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton gathered here signals how firmly California was woven into that broader campaign, and how early. Wallis and her allies were doing this work decades before the vote was finally secured nationwide — laying groundwork whose payoff would come to a later generation.
This is a landmark in the widening of American democracy itself. The right so many now take for granted was carried forward by determined people in ordinary homes, and this homesite marks one place where that determination lived.
If you visit
The farm is gone, but its footprint in history remains, marked on ground that has since become part of a very different Palo Alto. Standing here, you can trade the modern surroundings for a moment and imagine a farmhouse whose parlor once buzzed with strategy and conviction.
Read the plaque and note the names it gathers — a California pioneer, two of the nation's most famous reformers, and a former president, all connected to this single patch of earth. It's a reminder that momentous history often happened in modest, domestic places.
The site makes a meaningful stop for anyone interested in women's history or the roots of the suffrage movement on the West Coast. Let it prompt the thought that democracy was expanded not only in capitals, but in homes like the one that once stood here.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Sarah Armstrong Wallis
- · Susan B. Anthony
- · Elizabeth Cady Stanton
- · Ulysses S. Grant
Related events
- · California woman suffrage movement
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Mayfield Farm, Homesite of Sarah Wallis
Palo Alto, CA
On this site once stood the home of Sarah Armstrong Wallis (1825–1905), a leading California pioneer of the women's suffrage movement. Her Mayfield home became a gathering place for the cause, drawing national figures said to include Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Wallis helped organize early suffrage efforts on the Pacific Coast decades before the vote was won.
Juana Briones Park
Palo Alto, CA
This ground was once part of Rancho La Purísima Concepción, a Mexican land grant issued in 1846 to José Gorgonio, a former Santa Clara Mission Indian. The rancho soon passed to Juana Briones de Miranda, a remarkable Californiana who ran cattle, healed the sick, and became one of the region's few independent landowning women. The park now bears her name.
Carmelite Monastery ~ Bond Ranch
Santa Clara, CA
In 1917, amid the orchards of the Santa Clara Valley, a chapel and residence were consecrated as a permanent home for a community of cloistered Discalced Carmelite nuns, women who devoted their lives to prayer and enclosure. The monastery rose on land tied to the family of the prominent San Franciscan Phelan, established in memory of his sister, Mrs. Francis J. Sullivan. For more than a century such communities have preserved a contemplative tradition in the midst of a rapidly modernizing California.
Iris Chang (1968–2004) Memorial
San Jose, CA
This marker honors Iris Chang, a San José resident, journalist, and historian best known for her landmark book documenting the atrocities at Nanjing during World War II. A tireless advocate for human rights and historical memory, Chang gave voice to victims whose suffering had gone underacknowledged. Her work brought international attention to a dark chapter of the twentieth century.