The logic was simple and industrial. Every kilometre of track consumed sleepers, and every locomotive consumed fuel, so the Paulista decided to grow its own supply rather than buy it. Navarro de Andrade turned the assignment into a research programme, comparing species and growth rates on Rio Claro's soil with a thoroughness that shaped eucalyptus forestry across Brazil for the rest of the century. In 1916 the operation acquired a museum — the Museu do Eucalipto, the only one of its kind in the country, sitting inside the plantation it documents. Today the Floresta Estadual Edmundo Navarro de Andrade is managed as a conservation unit, an odd hybrid of exotic monoculture and public woodland where people run, birdwatch and picnic among trees that were originally accounting decisions.

Rio Claro's other inheritance is the railway itself. The Companhia Paulista's main trunk line was pushed inland to move coffee, and when the first train pulled in on 11 August 1876, the city was the end of the line — the terminus, where the interior's crop met the rails to Santos. Being a terminus reorganises a town. In 1892 the Paulista bought the English-owned Rio Claro Railway and installed its workshops here; at their height they employed nearly 1,500 people, making them one of the largest single employers in the state. Whole neighbourhoods grew up around the yards. The city's railway era is over, but its street pattern still remembers it, and the old station remains one of the most recognisable buildings in town.

Long before any of that, people lived along these rivers. Human occupation of the Rio Claro region goes back at least 11,000 years, with the earliest known communities settling near the Passa-Cinco, Cabeça and Corumbataí rivers and their tributaries, on terraces and rises above the water. They made stone tools for hunting and appear to have used the region intensively rather than passing through. Around a thousand years ago, semi-sedentary Tupi-Guarani peoples came to occupy the area — the same broad group the Portuguese encountered along the coast in the early 16th century. The Tupi-Guarani of Rio Claro may be ethnologically linked to the Guarani-Kaiowá, and they seem to have shared or contested this ground with peoples associated with the southern Jê, possibly the Kaingang. Their settlements sat where the modern towns sit. The city was built on top of somebody's home.

The municipality was incorporated in 1827 as the village of São João Batista do Ribeirão Claro, a date the city still marks every 24 June as a municipal holiday. The name was shortened later. Through the 19th century, coffee money pulled in immigrants in remarkable variety: Germans, Swiss and Italians in the largest numbers, then Spanish, Portuguese and eastern Europeans, along with a substantial community of Christian Arabs — mostly Syrians and Lebanese — from the territory of the Ottoman Empire. Japanese families came later. Rio Claro also has a large Afro-Brazilian population, descendants in many cases of the enslaved people whose labour built the coffee wealth that paid for the railway that planted the forest. All of it is stacked in the same small city.

Modern Rio Claro sits at 613 metres and runs on education as much as industry. The public university UNESP maintains a campus here teaching geology, geography, environmental engineering, mathematics, physics, computer science, physical education, ecology, biology and teacher training — a science-heavy roster that fits a city surrounded by quarries, plantations and river basins. Football provides the older loyalties. Rio Claro Futebol Clube was founded in 1909, the same year as the forest, and Associação Esportiva Velo Clube Rioclarense followed in 1910. A century-old derby in a city with a century-old eucalyptus collection: Rio Claro tends to keep what it starts.