Vignette > Alice Eastwood

Eastwood Trail, Camp Eastwood and Camp Eastwood Road are on Mt. Tamalpais maps.  Eastwood Way and Eastwood Park are in Tam Valley.  They are named for the self-taught botanist, Alice Eastwood, who botanized Mt. Tam actively from 1912 to 1929.  She was the Curator of Botany at the California Academy of Sciences from 1892 to 1949. She was born in Toronto in 1859 and died in 1953 at age 94. In 1920, she built a house at what is today 609 Summit Ave.  Her 3-acre garden was a botanical museum.  After using the place for weekend use, she rented it for several years as a source of income.  It was destroyed in the 1929 fire. In 1912 she became a charter member of the Tamalpais Conservation Club. She was also one of the few women permitted by reason of her hiking prowess, to become a member (but only as an associate) of the all male Cross Country Boys Club.  She and a few of her club friends were known as the “Hill Tribe”.  A member described her as “a famous plant-hunter who trudged easily twenty miles a day carrying her heavy plant presses on her back.”