This Week in Marin History
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June 2008

Off to Eastland

On June 29, 1892, the little town of Mill Valley was renamed Eastland, and it wasn’t until 1900 that the town was incorporated as Mill Valley. (“Mill Valley” came from the sawmill John Reed built in Cascade Canyon in 1836.) The name change was in tribute to Joseph Green Eastland, President of the Tamalpais Land & Water Company who helped finance much of the town’s development. His homesites were quickly auctioned off, due in large part to good planning, scenic beauty and a connection with the North Pacific Coast Railroad. (The train depot bore the name Eastland for many years, and the post office name didn’t change to Mill Valley until 1904.) Joseph’s surname is absent from the town today, although Ethel Avenue is named for his daughter.

Jumbo and Pee Wee

On June 14, 1916, Sausalito’s Depot Park—replete with two elephants—was dedicated. Of course the elephants weren’t real, and today they’re beloved landmarks in the renamed Plaza de Vina del Mar (Sausalito’s sister city in Chile). The original 14-foot-tall elephant bases with flagpoles graced the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, standing in front of the fair’s Triumphal Arch of the Rising Sun in the Court of the Universe. A year later, architect William Faville, designer of the elephants and much of the fair, ferried them (along with an Italianate fountain) over to his hometown of Sausalito, where residents dubbed them Jumbo and Pee Wee. The statues eroded over time, and were later replaced with new castings topped with electric candelabras.

Lyford's legacy

On June 13, 1906, physician, inventor and land developer Benjamin Franklin Lyford died in Strawberry. A surgeon with the Union Army, Lyford emigrated west and married Hilarita Reed, inheritor of almost 1,500 acres in Tiburon. (Her father John Reed was granted Rancho Corte Madera del Presidio in 1834.) The New Hampshire native made his mark on the peninsula: The Lyford Tower, which still stands today, was built in 1889 as a gateway to his proposed Utopian community Hygeia, Tiburon’s first “subdivision,” and the Benjamin Lyford House is now part of the Richardson Bay Audubon Center and Sanctuary. What Lyford didn’t leave: His secret embalming technique that preserved the body in a “most lifelike state…” His formula reportedly died with him.