Thomas Brothers Map of Mill Valley [and] Sausalito

Description

A fabulous hand watercolored map of the town of Mill Valley in Marin County, California. Among an array of interesting features, the map shows the Northwest Pacific Railroad line running down Miller Avenue. It reaches its terminus at the Lytton Square Depot. From there, another railroad line, that of the Mt Tamalpais & Muir Woods Railway, continues to the northwest. Early real estate tracts are depicted, along with tidelands. This being the before the automobile age (the true boom in car use in this area took place after the completion of the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937), the “State Highway” depicted on the map is a peripheral road. A double railroad line at the bottom of the map follows the route of today’s Highway 101.

The backside features a bonus map of the famous town of Sausalito. It extends from the area of Old Town, with its numbered street grid, along the waterfront past downtown/ferry pier to North Sausalito (New Town).

Across New Town is written ‘Sausalito Land and Ferry Co.,’ which was originally formed in 1868 after acquiring the majority of Rancho del Sausalito the town’s founder, William Richardson.

The Northwestern Pacific Railroad operated a ferry service to Sausalito at which passengers would switch to one of their trains. The map shows the railroad line running from the waterfront and cutting between Caledonia and Humboldt Ave. The Northwestern Pacific would be another casualty of the automobile age and closed its Sausalito terminal in March 1941. The original line of the railroad would eventually become that of today’s Bridgeway Avenue.

Humboldt, Donahue, and Railroad Avenues all no longer exist, and we suspect that much of this area was speculative – water lots targeted for development that never took place.