By Helen Kerr and Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society
Helen Kerr was a Marin journalist who once edited the Sausalito News. She was also on the Board of the Sausalito Arts Festival as early as 1956. Her beautifully calligraphed and illustrated book, “Sausalito Since the Days of the Dons,” is in the collection of the Historical Society, and in select Marin County libraries. Here are some lightly edited excerpts describing life here in the 19th century.
Settlers like [Capt. Wm.] Richardson had little cause to rejoice in the Bear Flag Rebellion. The days under Mexican rule had been peaceful and profitable, but in 1846 California became a pawn in a game of power politics. For a time it was uncertain whether California would remain Mexican, be taken over by the United States or England or become an independent republic.
ILLUSTRATION BY ALBERT GARVEY
The Bear Flag flew briefly in California
Sausalito played its role in the events of that time. With Captain John Frémont on his trail, the Mexican cavalry officer Captain de la Torre debarked from Sausalito in one of Richardson’s boats. Frémont, whose career is still the subject of heated controversy, described in his memoirs how he rowed a longboat from the captain of the American vessel MOSCOW, which was anchored at Sausalito, and made the crossing to Fort Point where he spiked the guns of Castillo del San Joaquin to prevent de la Torre from entrenching himself there.
In January of 1847 the treaty of Couenga ended hostilities and California became a possession of the United States.
On Christmas Day, 1849, when Captain Leonard Story arrived with his family at the site of what was to be Sausalito’s Old Town, he found there only a sawmill building and a shanty where the workers lived. He nonetheless deemed it an agreeable place to live and invested a thousand dollars in a house-frame which had been brought around the Horn. Others took up residence in the next few years, among them Robert Parker, who built a hotel, Fountain House, and a government store. But this first spurt of growth was short-lived, for when the town of Sacramento was badly damaged by fire in 1852 many of Sausalito’s buildings were dismantled and the lumber sold upriver to rebuild Sacramento.
Between 1853 and 1868 Sausalito could hardly have been called a town, but 1868 saw the formation of the Sausalito Land and Ferry Company, a partnership of twenty “San Francisco gentlemen” who purchased some three miles of waterfront property and proceeded to divide it up into “town lots and country seats.” They also laid out avenues and streets and established a regular ferry service to San Francisco.
Business was anything but brisk in the first days of the ferry run — often the passengers numbered only five or six — and it was the custom of the captain of the steamer PRINCESS to call the roll of commuters before casting off the hawser. “I can’t afford to leave one behind,” he explained to strangers.
Commerce in water and lumber had come to an end by 1880, but the dairy industry had developed steadily, with San Francisco as a convenient and ready market. With the dairy industry grew Sausalito’s New Town, for beginning in the 1870’s the dairying attracted a host of Portuguese immigrants from the Azores. Sober-minded, hard-working men, they brought their families with them or married into the Marin clan, encouraging their relatives back on the islands to join them.
A member of the original colony, Mrs. May Ann (Josie) Rosa, bright-eyed and clear-minded at the age of 93, described her childhood in Sausalito of the late nineteenth century. Her father, Joseph Silva, had come to Sausalito aboard a whaler, settled at the end of town and married a girl from Sã0 Jorge who had been brought over to keep house for her brothers. Josie and the other children walked several miles back and forth to school each day. As the youngsters passed the scattered homes along the way to the school on Hannon’s Hill, their classmates fell in with them, and the walk constituted their social life for the day.
Their route took them past Shanghai Valley, now part of Marinship, where a number of Chinese railroad workers lived. There were no women and children and in Shanghai Valley and the men, certainly homesick for their families, made friends with the children and offered them sweets on holidays. The Chinese lived quietly in Sausalito until the North Pacific Coast Railway was completed, then they disappeared.