Anna Zschokke

In the early 1890s Palo Alto was a grid of stakes, a lumber yard and a handful of houses going up across the tracks from the new university. Families who moved here for Stanford had a problem: there was nowhere to send their children to school. One of the people who fixed that was Anna Zschokke, a widow with three children who had arrived among the very first settlers. She lobbied for the first schoolhouse. When the town had no high school, she mortgaged her own home to build one.

Sources on her are thin. The fullest account is a profile on PaloAltoHistory.org, drawn from her own 1896 writing and from Palo Alto Historical Association photos. Palo Alto High School and the Palo Alto Unified School District add dates. This page keeps to what those sources say and widens out to how schooling began in Palo Alto and Mayfield. Our page on the founding of Palo Alto covers the town itself.

From Germany to the Santa Clara Valley

According to PaloAltoHistory.org, Anna Zschokke was born in Germany in 1849 and came to America at about three. Before Palo Alto she lived in Indiana, in Kern County and in Santa Clara. Her husband, Oscar, died before she moved north. She raised three children, sons Arthur and Theodore and daughter Irma.

The same profile notes that a family trust in Switzerland later helped her pay for the high school building. Her date of death is not given in the sources we found, so we do not guess at it.

Among the first residents

When the Zschokkes came to the new town near Stanford, there were no finished houses. PaloAltoHistory.org says she and her children camped alongside six other families while their homes were built. Her house, on Homer Avenue, was the first one finished. On that basis the site calls her Palo Alto's first resident.

She later described those months with good humor: "we overcame the loneliness of our situation by entertaining each other with tea parties." She was also a leader in the town's social life and an early member of the Woman's Club of Palo Alto, founded on June 20, 1894, by 24 women. Our page on women in Palo Alto history lists that club's early achievements.

The town's first historian

Zschokke wrote down what she saw. Her "Pioneer History of the Town of Palo Alto" ran in the Palo Alto Live Oak in 1896 and was reprinted in the Palo Alto Times in 1917. It is the source of many of the "firsts" still repeated today:

• Population. She counted 37 people at the start of 1891, 73 by New Year's Eve 1891, about 300 by the end of 1892 and 750 by the close of 1893.
• First baby. Andrew McLachlan Jr.
• First church services, held "under the trees near the lumber yard."
• First accident. On August 30, 1890, a man named L. Gillan was struck and killed by the Sunday Monterey Express. Our railroad history covers the line that ran through town.
• First shops. H. W. Simkins opened the first bookstore on High Street and E. F. Weishaar the first grocery, in a room of the Palo Alto Hotel.
• First newspaper. The first issue of the Palo Alto Times appeared on January 3, 1893. Our page on Palo Alto's newspapers picks up that thread.

The 1893 schoolhouse

Children in the new town first fell under the Mayfield school district to the south. That changed when, as PaloAltoHistory.org tells it, measurements showed Palo Alto lay outside Mayfield's two-mile jurisdiction. The town needed its own school.

Zschokke lobbied the county superintendent of schools for one. The Palo Alto Unified School District dates its founding to March 20, 1893. Residents then built a temporary two-room schoolhouse, according to PaloAltoHistory.org in just four days. The district says the school opened in September 1893 with two teachers and 70 pupils. Our founding page notes that a 1922 county biography credits lumberman J. F. Parkinson with donating lumber for the first school.

In 1894 a larger school went up at Webster Street and Channing Avenue, PaloAltoHistory.org says. Paly's history calls it the Channing Avenue Grammar School.

A high school paid for with a mortgage

Palo Alto's high school began in borrowed space. Paly's own history says it opened in 1894 as a private school with three teachers, 24 students and tuition of $6 a month, meeting in two upstairs rooms of the Channing Avenue Grammar School.

Three years later, about 1897, Zschokke stepped in. Paly says that as a trustee and parent she "mortgaged her home and donated funds to build a three-room high school" on Forest Avenue near Cowper Street. PaloAltoHistory.org adds detail: she bought the lot, put up a three-room building with plumbing and added a shack behind her house as a science lab. The building served as a temporary high school for about four years.

In 1900 voters approved a bond for a public high school, which rose at Channing Avenue and Webster Street, where the Channing House retirement community stands today. When the town opened that school, Zschokke turned her old classrooms into her own living room and bedrooms. Her generosity earned her the title "Mother of the Palo Alto schools." Paly counts her as its founder. The high school moved again in December 1918 to its current campus at Embarcadero Road and El Camino Real. Our Palo Alto High School page continues the story.

Before Palo Alto: Mayfield's school

Schooling in the area is older than Palo Alto. Mayfield, the farm and saloon town to the south that joined Palo Alto in 1925, opened its first school in 1855. A marker placed in 1969 by the city and the Palo Alto Historical Association in Evergreen Park reads, "Under a great live oak and near this spot stood the first school in the old town of Mayfield, now a part of Palo Alto." It adds that two later schools stood on the same block. Our page on Mayfield covers that rival town.

Early schooling timeline

The Zschokke name today

The Zschokke name also survives on High Street, where the Theodore Zschokke Cottages were added to the National Register of Historic Places on May 26, 2020. Anna had a son named Theodore, though we have not confirmed the cottages' building history. Our list of historic landmarks includes them. They are private property, so view them from the sidewalk.

Her bigger legacy is a school system that grew from 70 pupils in a building raised in four days to the district families move here for today. When the Palo Alto History Museum opens in the Roth Building, its collections should be a good place to look for more on her. Its opening was postponed in January 2026 after water leaks, with no new date yet.

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