Samuel Penfield Taylor

Samuel Penfield Taylor (October 9, 1827, Saugerties, New York - January 22, 1886, San Francisco, California) was an entrepreneur who made his fortune during the California Gold Rush, best known for building the Pioneer Paper Mill, the first paper mill in California. The grandson of George Taylor, a Pennsylvanian who signed the Declaration of Independence, Samuel Taylor departed from Boston Harbor in a schooner that he purchased with a group of friends, arriving in San Francisco ten months later. His first business was a bacon and egg stand on the beach where he prepared meals and made enough money to go into the lumber business. In 1853, he also worked as a gold miner in Tuolumne County, California and used his profits to expand his lumber business.

Samuel Taylor was ahead of his time in producing recycled paper products from rags and old papers that his employees collected from various California cities and in creating the first fish ladder on the West Coast to help fish swim upstream around the dam near his paper mill. Taylor also found time to marry Sarah Washington Irving (favorite niece of the writer and poet Washington Irving), raise a large family of seven boys and one girl, and serve as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Working with other concerned citizens of San Francisco, Mr. and Mrs. Taylor helped stop the importation of Chinese slave girls into San Francisco.

After Samuel Taylor's death in 1886, his wife lost the paper mill and land around it in the Panic of 1893. In a strange twist of fate, the new owners of the Taylors' land (who refused to allow Sarah Taylor to be buried next to her husband on the family plot) lost the property themselves when it was taken by the State of California in 1945 for non-payment of taxes. The state then created Samuel P. Taylor State Park. Taylor is buried on a hill overlooking the former site of the mill. His gravesite was restored in 1997 by Freemasons of San Francisco Oriental Lodge No. 144