Several early downtown Redwood City sites trace the town’s commercial and civic development. The Diller-Chamberlain General Store at 726 Main Street began as John V. Diller’s one-story wooden general store in the 1850s, with a brick building added by 1859 fronting Main Street on land by Redwood Creek, where logs were floated to San Francisco during the Gold Rush. It is identified as San Mateo County’s oldest commercial brick building or oldest continually operating commercial brick structure, the county’s first brick building, and the sole remnant of Redwood City’s earliest lumber-town days. From 1875 to 1911 it housed the Wells Fargo Express Office, and second owner P.P. Chamberlain, who served as county treasurer, kept county funds in the store safe; in 1938 it was remodeled as Quong Lee Laundry, and after the 1989 earthquake it was seismically retrofitted and restored to its 1859 appearance. The American Hotel site at Main Street and Broadway was the location of Redwood City’s first hotel, established in 1855 by A. Harris; enlarged and known as the American Hotel, it became the place where ballots in San Mateo County’s first election were counted in 1856 amid intimidation, ballot grabbing, and court action that secured Redwood City as county seat and let local residents choose their own officials. The first Board of Supervisors meeting was held there, and county offices were rented across the street in Diller’s Store until a courthouse could be built. After the American Hotel burned in 1864, Sidney Merrill built the three-story American House there in 1867; it burned in 1878, and the later Wahl Building on the site was removed in 1931 when Broadway was extended east from Main Street. The Sequoia Hotel at 800 Main Street rose from a prime downtown lot bought by local investors after the town lost its best hotel in the 1906 earthquake. Completed in 1912 at a cost of more than $100,000, the three-story brick hotel measured 100 feet by 100 feet, had sixty rooms, baths for every two rooms, hot and cold water, public restrooms on every floor, a lobby, dining room, public restaurant, and parlors for business and social meetings; in 1928 President Herbert Hoover stayed there while visiting Redwood City and riding in the Fourth of July Parade. The Bank of San Mateo County at 2000 Broadway, at the northeast corner of Main Street, was incorporated in 1891 as the first commercial bank on the Peninsula. After first operating from the Capitol Hotel, it commissioned Alfred I. Coffey in 1899 to design a Renaissance-style stone veneer building using cut stone from Utah; completed in 1900, it later expanded after the 1906 earthquake by incorporating the adjacent Ross building into a 55-foot facade, a renovation commemorated in 1910.