One of the few prominent Englishmen in Mexican-era California was former ship’s surgeon Edward Turner Bale, who lived in Monterey before marrying into a major land-owning family and acquiring a plot of land in the Napa Valley. It was here that he switched from practising medicine to turning the valley’s grain harvest into flour, constructing the area’s earliest water-powered grist mill to do so.

More than a hundred years after Bale’s death, the restored mill’s 36-ft-wide wheel is coaxed into three-and-a-half creaky revolutions per minute as park rangers and volunteers demonstrate its use and various long-neglected techniques of early Californian bread baking.

Passing a 19thC cemetery and the region’s earliest church, the park’s mile-long History Trail – which links with Bothe-Napa Valley State Park – also gives a hint of a bygone Napa Valley.