For thousands of years the Napa Valley and its clear-running streams provided food and shelter to small bands of Native Americans.  These family groups of Wappo people left only traces of their stone-age culture along streams such as Ritchey and Mill Creeks.  Now protected by law, these tools and obsidian flakes remind us of the earliest human uses of this area.

These early people were followed by Spanish and Mexican soldiers and settlers, who were followed in turn by American immigrants to what was then the Mexican province of Alta California.  Dr. Edward T. Bale was an Englishman who became a Mexican citizen and married a niece of Mariano Vallejo.  During the early 1840s, he acquired an 18,000-acre Mexican land grant that included much of the land between Rutherford and Calistoga.  Before the gold rush, many immigrants exchanged money or labor for parcels of Dr. Bale's land, and for the products of his two mills: a sawmill on the Napa River near the present Charles Krug Winery, and a grist mill in what is now Bale Grist Mill State Historic Park.

Dr. and Mrs. Charles M. Hitchcock acquired much of the present park as a country estate in the early 1870s.  The Hitchcocks and their daughter, Lillie Hitchcock Coit, staged lively social gatherings that made the valley and its resorts a favorite vacation spot with San Francisco's elite.  The Reverend Theodore B. Lyman also bought acreage in the Mill Creek watershed including the Bale Grist Mill itself and thereby helped preserve a sizeable example of the Napa landscape.

The valley's attractiveness to vacationers led Reinhold Bothe to acquire part of the Hitchcock estate after Lillie Coit's death in 1929.  The Hitchcock house, close beside Ritchey Creek, burned down after he acquired the property.  For many years, Bothe operated a private resort known as Paradise Park.   In 1960, the property became known as Bothe - Napa Valley State Park.