Navarro River Redwoods State Park, State park in Mendocino County, United States.
Navarro River Redwoods State Park is 660 acres of second-growth coast redwood forest in a narrow 11-mile strip on both banks of the Navarro River, from the town of Navarro to the river's mouth at the Pacific. State Route 128 runs through it along the north bank. The trunks are dark brown with deep vertical grooves, and leafy branches filter the light between them.
Charles Fletcher, a Scottish sailor and the first European settler on the Navarro estuary, arrived in 1851. In 1860 he sold most of his land to Henry Tichenor and Robert G. Byxbee, who built a lumber mill in 1861; Fletcher opened his inn in 1865 for sailors waiting to load ships. The mill closed in 1893, and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and later fires left the town of about 1,000 nearly empty by 1921.
The beach town around the mill was called Navarro until a second Navarro grew up inland; the coastal one became known as Navarro-by-the-Sea. Captain Fletcher's Inn, built in 1865 for sailors waiting to load lumber ships, stayed open until the 1970s. The Mill Superintendent's House now belongs to the Navarro-by-the-Sea Center.
State Route 128 runs through the park along the river's north bank and has many turnouts for day-use stops. The Navarro Beach Campground at the river mouth has no shade or drinking water, while the inland Paul M. Dimmick Campground has drinking water but can flood in winter.
The park's redwoods are all second-growth, regrown after 19th-century logging; the nearest old-growth stands are two groves a few miles southeast in Hendy Woods State Park. The beach at the river mouth is where the 1970 California Supreme Court case Dietz v. King confirmed public access, after the King family blocked the road in 1959.
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