La Loma Park is a tract of land located in the Berkeley Hills section of the city of Berkeley, California in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Spanish word loma means "rise/low hill". It was the property of Captain Richard Parks Thomas, a veteran of the Civil War and Berkeley businessman. Today, it is entirely a residential area. Although hilly throughout, its average elevation is about . History Captain Thomas' home was located on the site of what is today Greenwood Terrace. Some of the large trees here were originally planted by Captain Thomas and managed to survive the devastating fire of 1923 which swept through this part of Berkeley. Thomas enclosed his vast property with a low, whitewashed fence on its north, west and south sides, leaving the east side — the upper hillside — open. Captain Thomas was the owner of the Standard Soap Company in West Berkeley, president of the California National Bank of San Francisco, and owner of the Berkeley Ferryboat Line. He had a reputation as a friend of the working man and an eccentric character, and was probably the first person who inspired the nickname for the district: "Nut Hill". An old map includes a notation that he kept an illegal still on his property. He devised a scheme for an aerial tramway running from the Berkeley flatlands to the hills. Every Fourth of July, he fired off an old civil war cannon from "Fort La Loma", a plaza he constructed up the hill from his home. The site is today occupied by "Hume Cloister," also known as "Hume Castle" on Buena Vista Way, named for Samuel James Hume and his wife, who had architect John Hudson Thomas design a reduced-scale replica of a cloister in Toulouse, France. In the 19th century, a stone quarry was opened at the head of Codornices Creek, abutting the north boundary of the La Loma Park tract. Some of the rock quarried here had a pinkish hue and was used to tint the concrete sidewalks and pathways throughout parts of North Berkeley, a practice that has been maintained by the City to this day, albeit using tint from other sources. The quarry was closed by the 1940s. In the late 1960s the quarry was made into a public park, "Glendale-La Loma Park". A number of notable people have lived in the La Loma Park/Nut Hill area over the