This Week in Marin History
Archives
February 2009

Happy trails

On Feb. 28, 1941, ferries stopped service from San Francisco to Sausalito, marking the end of an era for city-dwellers who had discovered the joy of hiking on Mt. Tamalpais. Joy would also resonate on the ferry ride home. One alpiner’s account:  “ …I remember when hikers used to come off the mountain like locusts (and) head for a certain train out of Mill Valley… (They) were made to sit in the rear cars so the refined people wouldn’t get their clothes dirty from the dust the hikers brought with them. Each group had its own singing club; all the way to San Francisco by boat, music was heard coming from every place. One sometimes couldn’t hear the engines that turned the paddles.”

Hikers on the Mt. Tamalpais and Muir Woods Railway track, c.1900s.

State of a county

On Feb. 18, 1850, Marin County was one of 27 counties created by California’s first Legislature just months before the state was admitted to the Union. Nine counties, including Marin, had been added to a list of 18 counties earlier compiled by a committee chaired by General Mariano Vallejo.  Original boundaries often followed geographic features such as mountain ridges, but later counties were “sliced and diced” to create new counties. (Tax revenue and availability of water were some of the reasons.) Thirty-two additional counties were created after 1850—of the original 27 counties, only Marin neither added nor lost significant land to another county.

General Mariano G. Vallejo, c.1850s.

"...seem to defy nature"

On Feb. 9, 1895, the Sausalito News commented, “That Sausalito is not more popular year-around is probably owing to the lack of streetcar lines.…Work is now under way on a cable road from the ferry straight up the hill going west.” The cable cars never did go in, but that didn’t stop further construction of homes on Sausalito’s steep hills. (Most hillside residents at that time were British.) Indeed, one visitor in 1906 called Sausalito “the counterpart of many Italian hamlets which, clinging to some abrupt cliff or bluff, seem to defy nature.” Some of the town’s earlier homes, which still stand today, had been shipped in sections around Cape Horn.

Sausalito and yacht club, 1893.

A fellow's got to eat

In Feb. 1899, Victor Colwell was sentenced to seven years in prison for holding up a stagecoach on the San Rafael-Bolinas road near Fairfax. Marin County stage roads, often impossibly narrow, were also dangerous because of mudslides, fire, runaway horses (one team bolted at the sound of a train whistle) and outlaws. Colwell pointed a pistol at the driver and demanded that passengers throw out their money and watches. The driver thought he recognized the masked bandit—his father Jesse Colwell had built the road. After his capture by a posse, young Colwell lamented, “What’s a fellow to do when he can’t find work? I haven’t eaten in three days.”

Bolinas stage, 1906.