Vignettes

Just down the Dipsea Trail from Panoramic Highway, the Sun Trail veers off to the right. Follow it for 0.69 miles and you come to the Tourist Club, a local branch of Die Naturefreunde (Nature Friends) that has nearly 1500 clubhouses in 21 countries with over 600,000 members.  Die Nauturefreunde was founded in Vienna in1895…

J. Fred Schlingman had been initially a partner and later the sole owner of the Mill Valley Record. In 1904 he bought out the competing Enterprise, published the Record-Enterprise that later became the Mill Valley Record. In 1911 he sold the newspaper and moved to San Diego for other business opportunities.  With his departure Mill…

A serious railroad accident near the Mill Valley depot occurred shortly after midnight Sunday morning April 17, 1910.  A 3-car passenger train jumped the rails a few yards south of the freight station and plunged down the embankment into the creek. The wrecked train had left Mill Valley at 12:05 a. m. as scheduled to…

Roque Moraes (1883 – 1963) came to the Bay Area from the Azores at age 20. He came to Mill Valley later and ran a dairy on leased land in the Alto area for 36 years.  In 1940 he purchased the Wilkins Ranch. The barn on Highway 101 near the Tiburon Wye is visible in…

In 1930, the west end of Silva Island was dynamited away to accommodate the north end of the Richardson Bay Bridge. The island had been acquired by Anthony De Silva in 1873. Preliminary archaeological work done in 1907 identified the northeast side of Silva Island as a prehistoric site. It was named “Marin 17”.  In…