Located in Haifa District, east of Hadera, it falls under the jurisdiction of Menashe Regional Council.

During the late Ottoman period, in the 19th century, the area of Gan Shemuel were, according to historian Roy Marom, a part of a wooded, "sparsely populated coastal plain inhabited by Arabic-speaking highland peasants and nomads of Turkmen, Nubian, Egyptian and of Arabian-Peninsular descent".

Between 1878 and 1880, Circassian refugees belonging to the Shapsegh, Abadzekh, and Kabardian clans established the village of Mez/Khirbat al-Sarkas, a "modest adobe hamlet stood next to a swamp on the southern edge of the oak woodlands".

[3] After purchasing al-Dardara in 1891, the founders of the town of Hadera planted Gan Shmuel, a grove of etrogs (1895).

The lands of Gan Shmuel were transferred to the Jewish National Fund and a small group of pioneers took it upon themselves to tend to the orchards living in a multi-story house in 1913.