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I would say it is about 30 feet tall, and only 5 feet or so from the road. You have to climb over a barbed fence that is obviously bent from previous explorers. My friend's mom told me that in the 1970s the daughter of the Stanford Athletics Director was kidnapped, and they found her body there. The weirdest thing about Frenchman's Tower is that nobody knows why it's there. The windows were bricked over around 1970, most likely because of arson within the tower (there used to be wooden platforms inside). Most people think it was meant to be a base for a water tower, but the windows suggest otherwise. Others think it was part of a network of secret tunnels, a weapons cache, or a prison for the mad Madame Coutts. According to the nearby plaque, it was begun in 1875 as a part of Peter Coutts' irrigation system. "His real name was Paulin Caperon and he was a wealthy newspaper publisher who was banished during The Franco-Prussian War. He fled to California in [1874]". |
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