This wonderful historical site has so much to offer! I wish it was being maintained better! This site reaches to BEFORE California was part of the United States! Land was occupied in a very different way back then. A bit of history: this house was paradise to William and Eliza Hood during the Spring, Summer and Fall of every year.

The William Hood House, on the eastern outskirts of Santa Rosa near the Hood Mountain Regional Park, is an interesting old mansion in a semi-rural setting that includes the closed campus of the Los Guilicos reform school. One of the oldest surviving homes in Sonoma County, it was built in 1858 with bricks fired on the property. It later became part of the Los Guilicos campus which was later closed and moved to a new facility nearby. The house is still closed (2017) but there have been plans to open it to the public. The grounds are open to the public, however, and one can wander freely on the grounds of this old mansion, built at the base of a prominent mountain when Santa Rosa had fewer than 1,000 people and the largest town in the county (then Petaluma) had barely 1,500 people. It is an interesting place, a rather grand house for the era, and the grounds are interesting with a lovely setting where Santa Rosa meets the Sonoma Valley. The mid-20th century Los Guilicos buildings are around it and, abandoned, are themselves an interesting and eerie place to visit. One cannot go inside them but one can see furniture and other items still sitting in them, left behind. It is an interesting stop on the way between Sonoma and Santa Rosa.