Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Atherton, CA

Atherton was incorporated on September 12, 1923, and named for Faxon Dean Atherton, a Massachusetts-born hide and tallow trader who bought 640 acres here in 1860 for ten dollars an acre.

Before it was Atherton, the area was known as Fair Oaks, a flag stop on the Southern Pacific Railroad's California Coast Line where the owners of the great Peninsula estates boarded trains between San Francisco and San Jose.

Atherton was carved out of the old Rancho de las Pulgas, the Mexican land grant that once covered most of what is now southern San Mateo County.

Atherton exists largely because of a boundary fight - when Menlo Park moved to incorporate in 1923 including the Fair Oaks lands, the estate owners incorporated their own town instead and named it for Faxon Atherton.

Atherton had a population of 7,188 at the 2020 census, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Atherton has only about 2,227 households with an average of 2.85 people per household, and about 87.6% of its homes are owner-occupied, Census QuickFacts reports.

Atherton is consistently ranked among the wealthiest towns in America - Forbes placed its 94027 ZIP code at No. 2 on its list of America's most expensive ZIP codes in 2010, and its median home value tops the Census scale at more than $2,000,000.

Atherton's median household income exceeds $250,000, the highest figure the Census Bureau's reporting scale records.

Atherton is a purely residential town with essentially no industry or commerce inside its borders - its roughly 2,500 households shop in neighboring Menlo Park, Redwood City, and Palo Alto.

Menlo College, a small private business college, is located in Atherton, and Menlo-Atherton High School - one of the Peninsula's top-scoring public high schools - stands on the former Holmgrove estate of Joseph A. Donohoe.