The Martinez landscape was homeland to Bay Miwok people before Spanish missions, Mexican ranchos, and United States settlement transformed landholding and ecology. Physician and horticulturist John Theophil Strentzel developed a profitable fruit ranch there after arriving during the California Gold Rush era. In 1882 he completed a large Italianate house set among orchards and hills. The residence reflected agricultural prosperity through spacious rooms, a cupola, service areas, and ornamental grounds, while the surrounding ranch depended on workers, transport networks, irrigation, and commercial markets rather than wilderness isolation.

Scottish-born John Muir had already traveled widely and written about the Sierra Nevada when he married Strentzel's daughter Louisa in 1880. The couple first lived in a smaller house nearby, then moved into the mansion in 1890 with daughters Wanda and Helen. Muir managed ranch business, wrote in an upstairs study he called his scribble den, and used the property as a base for travel and advocacy. Louisa managed family and household responsibilities that helped make his public career possible, although popular accounts have often centered her husband alone.

From Martinez, Muir published books and articles that helped persuade readers to value wild landscapes. He advocated protection of Yosemite and other places, co-founded the Sierra Club in 1892, and opposed the damming of Hetch Hetchy Valley. His influence on conservation was profound but not uncomplicated. Some of his writing used demeaning racial language and romantic ideas of supposedly empty wilderness, obscuring Indigenous stewardship and displacement. Understanding Muir historically requires placing celebrated nature prose beside the era's colonial land policies, agricultural economy, and changing environmental thought.

Muir died in 1914. The house and portions of the ranch remained in family hands before suburban development consumed much of the agricultural landscape. Congress established the national historic site in 1964, and the National Park Service restored rooms, orchards, outbuildings, and grounds. The 1849 Martinez Adobe was added as a surviving structure from the Mexican and early American period, while Mount Wanda preserves hills named for Muir's elder daughter. The mansion and adobe contain original historic fabric, but wallpapers, furnishings, plantings, repaired surfaces, and room arrangements include restoration and interpretive replacement.

The National Park Service operates the site with generally free admission to the visitor center, mansion, orchards, Martinez Adobe, and trails, subject to hours and conditions. Exhibits and landscape programs interpret Muir, the Strentzel and Muir families, agricultural life, conservation, and the region's deeper Indigenous history. Modern accessibility routes, safety systems, and visitor facilities coexist with the historic buildings. The site is not Muir's untouched private refuge; it is a conserved domestic and working landscape that reveals how family resources, commercial farming, writing, travel, and public campaigning supported an influential and contested environmental legacy.