COWS, HORSES, AND RACETRACKS
IN Corte Madera
The historic Meadowsweet Dairy goes back 90 years in Corte Madera, making it the oldest developed site still existing in the part of Corte Madera’s bayside that was variously known on Census rolls during the 1800s as San Clemente, Tamalpais, and the Valentine Ranch. The Valentine brothers’ San Clemente Ranch headquarters was located in the circular cluster of trees just below the San Rafael – Sausalito Road that originally followed the winding curves along what’s now known as Meadowsweet Drive. Today, the site of the Valentine Ranch headquarters site is occupied by a townhouse complex in a grove of eucalyptus trees near Marin Joe's, but Meadowsweet Dairy still stands where it has since 1926.
Almost a hundred years before that, in 1834, Irish-born Juan Reed obtained the first Mexican land grant in Marin County, known as Rancho Corte Madera del Presidio. It was one square mile in size, or about 7,000 acres, and included the Tiburon Peninsula as well as most of present-day Mill Valley. Ironically, it was named after Arroyo Corte Madera in Mill Valley, long before Corte Madera Creek in the Lower Ross Valley got its name. While most accounts attribute the name Corte Madera, which means cut wood, to the harvesting of redwood trees milled into lumber for building either the Presidio or San Francisco, the name actually was in use during the 1700s when Spain ruled this part of California and had a small Presidio that required cordwood for cooking and heat. There were no trees in San Francisco, so the Spanish sent a few soldiers in a small boat to gather or cut small pieces of wood along the shore of Richardson Bay and its tributaries.
Rancho owner Juan Reed died unexpectedly in 1843, leaving his Mexican-born wife and four young children to manage the sprawling rancho that had thousands of sheep and cattle as well as several subsidiary operations involving lumber, hides, tallow, and produce. The Widow Reed’s struggles led the next Mexican governor give the family a second land grant about another square mile in size in 1846. It encompassed everything north of Mill Valley and Ring Mountain, extending to Arroyo Holon in today’s Baltimore Canyon.
When California declared statehood following the Bear Flag Rebellion in 1850, the rule was that Mexican land grants would be respected, but all other lands would belong to the federal government (not state government, as in some other newly established states around that time), and these public lands could be claimed by any citizen of the United States who filed a survey and submitted the legal paperwork to stake his claim.
As you might imagine, thousands of homesteaders, failed gold-miners, recent transplants from the East Coast, and entrepreneurs of many kinds rushed to gain control of as much public land as possible. Many homesteaders started dairy ranches on the grassy hillsides and meadows within the boundaries of Rancho Corte Madera del Presidio.
The Reed family’s first, 1834, land grant was upheld, but speculators were quick to file claims on land that was within the Reed family’s 1846 land grant, which the U.S. Lands Commission declined to uphold on the basis that the precise boundaries had been insufficiently described. It was dubbed the Reed Sobrantes, or Reed leftovers.
Literally decades of legal battles followed, and the Reed family’s claim to their 1846 land grant bounced back and forth through a whole generation of U.S. Land Commissioners, surveyors, and even the United States Congress, when Juan Reed’s daughter Hilarita made the journey to Washington D.C. to fight for the Reed family’s claim. Eventually, in 1885, they won, but the lawyers who had represented them over a period of 35 years took as their fee one-half of all the land they secured for the Reed family, and attorney John Bolton took title to the area that was called San Clemente.
Bolton sold it to the Valentine brothers, who established the San Clemente Stock Farm, where they bred and trained highly prized racing stock on the pasture lands adjacent to the new North Pacific Coast Railroad Tracks that went under Ring Mountain to the ferry terminal at Point Tiburon. The horses were transported by rail, as were the many well-off San Franciscans who regularly came by train to watch the races on the mile-long track built alongside the tracks in front of the ranch house, near the site where the Koch Luggage factory was built after World War II. The factory is now occupied by the very upscale headquarters of Restoration Hardware. (See the 1899 map below that shows the location of the Valentines' ranch house, the nearby road, and the one-mile racetrack parallel to the the railroad.)
In addition to controlling many thousands of acres of land, the Valentines owned the San Francisco printing company that printed major newspapers, official documents, and other important public information. They had impressive homes in San Francisco and belonged to exclusive clubs, enjoying their status as charter members of the City’s social elite. Thomas Valentine, who was also a lawyer, was the developer of Belvedere, after prevailing over the Widow Reed over the island’s ownership in legal battles. He died in 1893, leaving highly valued estate, but no known children.
His brother Samson Valentine lived many years longer, to the age of 89 in 1919. Although he had a San Francisco home at 2758 Union Street, he chose to spend his sunset years on the Valentines’ San Clemente Ranch in the company of the widow Mary J. Church, who was 20 years younger and listed in each of the Census reports as his cousin, although there is no evidence that the two were actually related. It would seem that he was her benefactor, as she was able to purchase numerous properties, including an 11-acre parcel on the Gardner tract that would later be key to the creation of Meadowsweet Dairy, and a 60-acre parcel that included the site where Meadowsweet Dairy would later be built.
The adjacent hillsides and marshes on the south and west had been acquired by James S. McCue in the early 1870s, when he began creating streets lined with homesites – the first modern-day subdivisions, almost a hundred years ago. McCue bragged about the three tract-like developments he put into place along streets now called Tamalpais, Manzanita, Oakdale, Sausalito, Eastman, Chapman, and Willow. He was a very colorful, if contentious man, who came West from Ohio at a young age and ran a stagecoach line in competition with Wells Fargo, had a traveling circus that he wintered in Corte Madera, exercising his phenomenal trick ponies on a half-mile racetrack he created by filling the marshland north of his tract between Chapman and Eastman. It’s where the Corte Madera Community Center now stands. Even as an old man, he went into the Klondike and ran a mail business there for several years before returning to Corte Madera and marrying his third wife. He was an amazing character who makes a great story.
In the early 1900s, there were numerous schemes being proposed for those marshes McCue acquired in the 1870s and later sold, including a Coney Island Amusement Park, a Venice-like residential neighborhood along canals and lagoons, and later, even an airport that was approved by the then-Town Council. None of it happened.
Meanwhile, the undeveloped hillside property west of the Valentine Ranch came to be known as Overmarsh, and was enjoyed by weekenders from San Francisco who pitched tents and picnicked on the grassy slopes overlooking the tidelands, frolicking in the good Marin weather. Mary J. Church saw an opportunity to acquire this 11-acre area at a low cost in 1905 and then subdivide it into three parcels that she was able to sell in 1907 to a trio of San Francisco socialites who were part of this good-time weekending group.
One of them, Minnie Tibbitts, who served as president of the prestigious California Club in San Francisco, and whose husband was president of the Sunset Publishing House, built a Bernard Maybeck-style home on her 3 and a half acres, calling it Casa Amina. A notable party she gave there there was described in a January 1911 local paper as: “One of the most delightful of the out of town week end parties arranged to usher in the new year was that of Mr. and Mrs. Howard Clinton Tibbitts, at their Overmarsh home near Corte Madera. The house, happily named Casa Amina, is ideal for large parties, the maple floor in the big living room being a constant joy to the dancing enthusiasts in the Overmarsh circle. On this occasion the party assembled at dinner and danced into the dawn of the new year.”
After several years of dividing their time between Casa Amina and their San Francisco home 1107 Greenwich Street, in 1914 the Tibbitts sold their home at Overmarsh for $20,000 to Minnie's friend Harriet Sherman, who had bought the adjacent 3 and a half acre parcel from Mary J. Church years earlier. Harriet had a home at 2238 Vallejo Street in San Francisco, where her sister Carlin, plus Carlin’s husband and son, lived with her. Harriet was a Northern California native who had been married to the larger-than-life Southern California financier, railroad magnate, and developer of the San Fernando Valley, Moses H. Sherman, with whom she had two daughters, Hazeltine and Lucy Sherman. The two girls were born early in the marriage, and the couple separated when they were still very young, after M.H. became entrenched in his business empire in Southern California. The couple had lived apart for many years by the time they were divorced in 1908.
As Hazeltine and Lucy grew up, they traveled extensively in Europe, but also spent time with each parent, in Southern California as well as the Bay Area. After Harriet bought the Tibbitts’ home at Overmarsh, she and her daughter Hazeltine acquired other parcels from the McCue family where homes for their friends were built. Harriet’s aging parents moved from their 160-acre fruit ranch in St Helena to live with Harriet and the girls at Overmarsh, where they resided until they died in 1920.
In 1921, Hazeltine Sherman, by then 34 years old, married 42-year-old Frank Keever, a Canadian civil engineer who had made a fortune in mining. Frank had invested in the hundreds of acres of tidelands once owned by James McCue, and he saw the potential for converting the marsh into pastures for raising hay and grazing cattle. Frank designed and constructed an ingenious system of floodgates to drain the tidelands and convert 1,400 acres into pastures. Hazeltine bought 60 acres of land adjacent to their home at Overmarsh that included the site where their Meadowsweet Farm Dairy would exist, and in 1926 Frank built what was publicized as "a state-of-the-art dairy to produce milk and cream of unsurpassed quality." He imported a herd of purebred Guernsey cows, installed a $50,000 state-of the-art Gane milking machine, and began marketing Grade A raw milk in San Rafael.
Frank spent so much time running the dairy that Hazeltine went to Europe several times by herself. Many local young men found that employment in the dairy was a way to earn money during hard times in the early 1930s. The dairy prospered for ten years, but when Frank and Hazeltine were divorced, the cows were shipped to the Shermans’ ranch in El Centro and the dairy routes were sold to Borden’s. After a short time, all of the Sherman property, including the dairy and the Maybeck-style house, was sold to a speculator named Hugh Porter, who was acquiring tidelands and other properties in the area.
After the divorce, Frank Keever moved to a hotel apartment in San Francisco. Hazeltine Keever moved to the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, where she died at the age of 82 in 1968. Her obituary mentioned that she left $1 million to the Los Angeles Chiropractic Hospital “in gratitude.”
It’s unclear whether anyone lived in the big house until trans-Pacific businessman Fred Sanford bought it in 1940 for himself, his wife, and two young children. He named it Villa Madera, and the Sanford-Dunn family lived in the big house for more than 60 years. It was sold by the Dunn heirs several years ago to restaurateur Tyler Florence and his wife, Tolan.
So, what happened to the dairy after it closed? Within a few years, vandals had stripped and gutted the empty structures. Meanwhile, less than half a mile away, a housewife and mother named Charlotte Conow was focused on her own vision for use of the dairy buildings. In spite of family counsel and dissuading friends, she sold her home on Sausalito Street to buy the rambling structure along with an acre and a half of ground. Limited in capital, it wasn’t easy for her to remodel the unconventional structures into places for people to live.
Fortunately, the buildings were basically sound, with cement floors and walls. Steel girders strengthened the framework, and the buildings were weather-tight except for the broken windows and skylights that were put first on the repair list. Charlotte Conow had previously spent many hours contemplating how each building could be utilized as it was. The 1100-suare-foot sterilizing room would become a living room. Adjoining enclosures were converted into bedrooms, kitchen and bath. The butter room became a two-room apartment, and the bottling room was turned into a six-room unit. The milking room was converted into a modern schoolroom where Charlotte inspired an entire generation of local children to cherish the natural environment. Charlotte Conow’s dream endured and flourished for 30 years at Meadowsweet Dairy. Her tenants continued to live in the apartments she had created in the former dairy buildings for years afterward.
In 1991, a developer won approval to tear down all the old Meadowsweet Dairy buildings and construct nine townhouses on the site. Efforts to save the old dairy gained traction, but no one had the funds to make it happen. Then a miracle occurred. Another buyer for the property swept in and managed to secure its purchase when the developer missed a crucial step in moving forward. Glenda Corning is the one to share that story with you….
Almost a hundred years before that, in 1834, Irish-born Juan Reed obtained the first Mexican land grant in Marin County, known as Rancho Corte Madera del Presidio. It was one square mile in size, or about 7,000 acres, and included the Tiburon Peninsula as well as most of present-day Mill Valley. Ironically, it was named after Arroyo Corte Madera in Mill Valley, long before Corte Madera Creek in the Lower Ross Valley got its name. While most accounts attribute the name Corte Madera, which means cut wood, to the harvesting of redwood trees milled into lumber for building either the Presidio or San Francisco, the name actually was in use during the 1700s when Spain ruled this part of California and had a small Presidio that required cordwood for cooking and heat. There were no trees in San Francisco, so the Spanish sent a few soldiers in a small boat to gather or cut small pieces of wood along the shore of Richardson Bay and its tributaries.
Rancho owner Juan Reed died unexpectedly in 1843, leaving his Mexican-born wife and four young children to manage the sprawling rancho that had thousands of sheep and cattle as well as several subsidiary operations involving lumber, hides, tallow, and produce. The Widow Reed’s struggles led the next Mexican governor give the family a second land grant about another square mile in size in 1846. It encompassed everything north of Mill Valley and Ring Mountain, extending to Arroyo Holon in today’s Baltimore Canyon.
When California declared statehood following the Bear Flag Rebellion in 1850, the rule was that Mexican land grants would be respected, but all other lands would belong to the federal government (not state government, as in some other newly established states around that time), and these public lands could be claimed by any citizen of the United States who filed a survey and submitted the legal paperwork to stake his claim.
As you might imagine, thousands of homesteaders, failed gold-miners, recent transplants from the East Coast, and entrepreneurs of many kinds rushed to gain control of as much public land as possible. Many homesteaders started dairy ranches on the grassy hillsides and meadows within the boundaries of Rancho Corte Madera del Presidio.
The Reed family’s first, 1834, land grant was upheld, but speculators were quick to file claims on land that was within the Reed family’s 1846 land grant, which the U.S. Lands Commission declined to uphold on the basis that the precise boundaries had been insufficiently described. It was dubbed the Reed Sobrantes, or Reed leftovers.
Literally decades of legal battles followed, and the Reed family’s claim to their 1846 land grant bounced back and forth through a whole generation of U.S. Land Commissioners, surveyors, and even the United States Congress, when Juan Reed’s daughter Hilarita made the journey to Washington D.C. to fight for the Reed family’s claim. Eventually, in 1885, they won, but the lawyers who had represented them over a period of 35 years took as their fee one-half of all the land they secured for the Reed family, and attorney John Bolton took title to the area that was called San Clemente.
Bolton sold it to the Valentine brothers, who established the San Clemente Stock Farm, where they bred and trained highly prized racing stock on the pasture lands adjacent to the new North Pacific Coast Railroad Tracks that went under Ring Mountain to the ferry terminal at Point Tiburon. The horses were transported by rail, as were the many well-off San Franciscans who regularly came by train to watch the races on the mile-long track built alongside the tracks in front of the ranch house, near the site where the Koch Luggage factory was built after World War II. The factory is now occupied by the very upscale headquarters of Restoration Hardware. (See the 1899 map below that shows the location of the Valentines' ranch house, the nearby road, and the one-mile racetrack parallel to the the railroad.)
In addition to controlling many thousands of acres of land, the Valentines owned the San Francisco printing company that printed major newspapers, official documents, and other important public information. They had impressive homes in San Francisco and belonged to exclusive clubs, enjoying their status as charter members of the City’s social elite. Thomas Valentine, who was also a lawyer, was the developer of Belvedere, after prevailing over the Widow Reed over the island’s ownership in legal battles. He died in 1893, leaving highly valued estate, but no known children.
His brother Samson Valentine lived many years longer, to the age of 89 in 1919. Although he had a San Francisco home at 2758 Union Street, he chose to spend his sunset years on the Valentines’ San Clemente Ranch in the company of the widow Mary J. Church, who was 20 years younger and listed in each of the Census reports as his cousin, although there is no evidence that the two were actually related. It would seem that he was her benefactor, as she was able to purchase numerous properties, including an 11-acre parcel on the Gardner tract that would later be key to the creation of Meadowsweet Dairy, and a 60-acre parcel that included the site where Meadowsweet Dairy would later be built.
The adjacent hillsides and marshes on the south and west had been acquired by James S. McCue in the early 1870s, when he began creating streets lined with homesites – the first modern-day subdivisions, almost a hundred years ago. McCue bragged about the three tract-like developments he put into place along streets now called Tamalpais, Manzanita, Oakdale, Sausalito, Eastman, Chapman, and Willow. He was a very colorful, if contentious man, who came West from Ohio at a young age and ran a stagecoach line in competition with Wells Fargo, had a traveling circus that he wintered in Corte Madera, exercising his phenomenal trick ponies on a half-mile racetrack he created by filling the marshland north of his tract between Chapman and Eastman. It’s where the Corte Madera Community Center now stands. Even as an old man, he went into the Klondike and ran a mail business there for several years before returning to Corte Madera and marrying his third wife. He was an amazing character who makes a great story.
In the early 1900s, there were numerous schemes being proposed for those marshes McCue acquired in the 1870s and later sold, including a Coney Island Amusement Park, a Venice-like residential neighborhood along canals and lagoons, and later, even an airport that was approved by the then-Town Council. None of it happened.
Meanwhile, the undeveloped hillside property west of the Valentine Ranch came to be known as Overmarsh, and was enjoyed by weekenders from San Francisco who pitched tents and picnicked on the grassy slopes overlooking the tidelands, frolicking in the good Marin weather. Mary J. Church saw an opportunity to acquire this 11-acre area at a low cost in 1905 and then subdivide it into three parcels that she was able to sell in 1907 to a trio of San Francisco socialites who were part of this good-time weekending group.
One of them, Minnie Tibbitts, who served as president of the prestigious California Club in San Francisco, and whose husband was president of the Sunset Publishing House, built a Bernard Maybeck-style home on her 3 and a half acres, calling it Casa Amina. A notable party she gave there there was described in a January 1911 local paper as: “One of the most delightful of the out of town week end parties arranged to usher in the new year was that of Mr. and Mrs. Howard Clinton Tibbitts, at their Overmarsh home near Corte Madera. The house, happily named Casa Amina, is ideal for large parties, the maple floor in the big living room being a constant joy to the dancing enthusiasts in the Overmarsh circle. On this occasion the party assembled at dinner and danced into the dawn of the new year.”
After several years of dividing their time between Casa Amina and their San Francisco home 1107 Greenwich Street, in 1914 the Tibbitts sold their home at Overmarsh for $20,000 to Minnie's friend Harriet Sherman, who had bought the adjacent 3 and a half acre parcel from Mary J. Church years earlier. Harriet had a home at 2238 Vallejo Street in San Francisco, where her sister Carlin, plus Carlin’s husband and son, lived with her. Harriet was a Northern California native who had been married to the larger-than-life Southern California financier, railroad magnate, and developer of the San Fernando Valley, Moses H. Sherman, with whom she had two daughters, Hazeltine and Lucy Sherman. The two girls were born early in the marriage, and the couple separated when they were still very young, after M.H. became entrenched in his business empire in Southern California. The couple had lived apart for many years by the time they were divorced in 1908.
As Hazeltine and Lucy grew up, they traveled extensively in Europe, but also spent time with each parent, in Southern California as well as the Bay Area. After Harriet bought the Tibbitts’ home at Overmarsh, she and her daughter Hazeltine acquired other parcels from the McCue family where homes for their friends were built. Harriet’s aging parents moved from their 160-acre fruit ranch in St Helena to live with Harriet and the girls at Overmarsh, where they resided until they died in 1920.
In 1921, Hazeltine Sherman, by then 34 years old, married 42-year-old Frank Keever, a Canadian civil engineer who had made a fortune in mining. Frank had invested in the hundreds of acres of tidelands once owned by James McCue, and he saw the potential for converting the marsh into pastures for raising hay and grazing cattle. Frank designed and constructed an ingenious system of floodgates to drain the tidelands and convert 1,400 acres into pastures. Hazeltine bought 60 acres of land adjacent to their home at Overmarsh that included the site where their Meadowsweet Farm Dairy would exist, and in 1926 Frank built what was publicized as "a state-of-the-art dairy to produce milk and cream of unsurpassed quality." He imported a herd of purebred Guernsey cows, installed a $50,000 state-of the-art Gane milking machine, and began marketing Grade A raw milk in San Rafael.
Frank spent so much time running the dairy that Hazeltine went to Europe several times by herself. Many local young men found that employment in the dairy was a way to earn money during hard times in the early 1930s. The dairy prospered for ten years, but when Frank and Hazeltine were divorced, the cows were shipped to the Shermans’ ranch in El Centro and the dairy routes were sold to Borden’s. After a short time, all of the Sherman property, including the dairy and the Maybeck-style house, was sold to a speculator named Hugh Porter, who was acquiring tidelands and other properties in the area.
After the divorce, Frank Keever moved to a hotel apartment in San Francisco. Hazeltine Keever moved to the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, where she died at the age of 82 in 1968. Her obituary mentioned that she left $1 million to the Los Angeles Chiropractic Hospital “in gratitude.”
It’s unclear whether anyone lived in the big house until trans-Pacific businessman Fred Sanford bought it in 1940 for himself, his wife, and two young children. He named it Villa Madera, and the Sanford-Dunn family lived in the big house for more than 60 years. It was sold by the Dunn heirs several years ago to restaurateur Tyler Florence and his wife, Tolan.
So, what happened to the dairy after it closed? Within a few years, vandals had stripped and gutted the empty structures. Meanwhile, less than half a mile away, a housewife and mother named Charlotte Conow was focused on her own vision for use of the dairy buildings. In spite of family counsel and dissuading friends, she sold her home on Sausalito Street to buy the rambling structure along with an acre and a half of ground. Limited in capital, it wasn’t easy for her to remodel the unconventional structures into places for people to live.
Fortunately, the buildings were basically sound, with cement floors and walls. Steel girders strengthened the framework, and the buildings were weather-tight except for the broken windows and skylights that were put first on the repair list. Charlotte Conow had previously spent many hours contemplating how each building could be utilized as it was. The 1100-suare-foot sterilizing room would become a living room. Adjoining enclosures were converted into bedrooms, kitchen and bath. The butter room became a two-room apartment, and the bottling room was turned into a six-room unit. The milking room was converted into a modern schoolroom where Charlotte inspired an entire generation of local children to cherish the natural environment. Charlotte Conow’s dream endured and flourished for 30 years at Meadowsweet Dairy. Her tenants continued to live in the apartments she had created in the former dairy buildings for years afterward.
In 1991, a developer won approval to tear down all the old Meadowsweet Dairy buildings and construct nine townhouses on the site. Efforts to save the old dairy gained traction, but no one had the funds to make it happen. Then a miracle occurred. Another buyer for the property swept in and managed to secure its purchase when the developer missed a crucial step in moving forward. Glenda Corning is the one to share that story with you….