Muir Woods National Monument preserves a rare old-growth coast redwood forest in Redwood Canyon on Mount Tamalpais near San Francisco. Its steep terrain helped spare it from logging, and in the early 1900s William and Elizabeth Thacher Kent bought land to protect the grove from cutting and reservoir development. Using the Antiquities Act of 1906, Kent donated acreage to the federal government, and President Theodore Roosevelt established the monument on January 9, 1908, naming it for John Muir rather than Kent. Later additions expanded the protected area. Ocean fog, wet winters, and sheltered topography sustain the redwoods, while the site also became a prominent Bay Area destination and place of twentieth-century remembrance.