This Week in Marin History
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June 2010

  
     

Good as new

On June 30, 1913, Northwestern Pacific Railroad Engine #112, built in the Tiburon rail yards, went into the bay off Tiburon when a pier collapsed. By 1909, Sausalito served as the NWP’s primary passenger terminal in Marin County, and Tiburon was the freight terminal, where loaded railroad cars were lowered onto barges or ferries by a “gallows frame.” Although the system failed for “Old No. 112,” the engine was eventually salvaged from the bay, dried out and put back on the rails, running until the steam trains faded from the Tiburon route. One of the surviving NWP locomotives is now on exhibit at the California State Railroad Museum in Old Sacramento.

  


NWP Engine #112, c. 1930s. (Marin History Museum – Graham Collection.)

     
 
     

"Sensible" gift

June in 1923 was a busy month for the Tamalpais Centre in Kentfield, with the clubhouse hosting hikes, picnics and Marin County’s first “full-scale” rodeo that attracted cowboys from all over the West. William Kent had the Centre built in 1909 with the hope “it would cut down on local hoodlumism.” After all, it was Kent’s mother Adaline who wanted her donation of land for the clubhouse to be regarded not as generous but as “sensible.” Mrs. Kent celebrated her 80th birthday at the Centre, and Congressman Kent’s memorial service was held there. Fallen into disuse, it was turned over to the Marin Junior College District in 1927.

  


Tamalpais Centre, also known as the Stadium Building, in Kentfield, 1910.

     
 
     

Road trip

A June 16, 1916 San Anselmo Herald news item: “Lil Minstrel and Donald Eastman made an auto trip Sunday to the top of Red Hill, going up in Lil’s Ford, and from reports they had some time. It was not so much the length of the trip or the steepness of the incline but the numerous short turns in winding back and forth…and the fact that it was the first vehicle to go to the top of the hill in twenty-three years…  The speedometer showed that it was three quarters of a mile up the hill, but it took them an hour and a quarter to make the trip up… At any rate we don’t believe we should venture to take such a ride unless we had a pretty good amount of accident and life insurance.”

  


Road carved into Red Hill in San Anselmo, c.1900. (MHM–Roy Farrington Jones Collection)

     
 
     

First people

In June 1579, when Sir Francis Drake allegedly moored in what is today Drake’s Bay, his chaplain described Marin County’s native population as “…having a…free and loving nature, without guile or treachery…the men commonly so strong of body that which 2 or 3 of our men could hardly beare … Their men for the most part goe naked; the women take a kinde of bulrushes…make themselves thereby a loose garment…which…hanges downe about their hippes, and so affordes to them a covering of that which nature teaches should be hidden; about their shoulders they weare also the skin of a deere, with the haire upon it…”

 


Illustration of Sir Francis Drake's ship the Golden Hind, n.d.