TVIC Local History Presentation

TAMALPAIS VALLEY EARLY YEARS

Tam Valley Community Center

You are invited to the presentation with archival photographs on the early history of Tamalpais Valley, from the Mexican Land Grants through the early Twentieth century.  Historian and environmental planner Elizabeth McKee has lived in Tamalpais Valley for 33 years.  In that time she has researched local history, which has revealed themes such as the influence of a landscape on the story of people who live there and how the lives of seemingly ordinary people can represent grander national trends and events.

You may learn that your home was formerly part of the encampment or firing range of the California National Guard’s Manzanita Rifle Range (as seen above, looking north from the 500 block of Marin Avenue over Pineo Avenue and up through Browning Street) in place between 1911 and 1917 in Tamalpais Valley.  Some of the soldiers who trained there were later sent to the border to chase Pancho Villa!  Or you may learn that your neighborhood was part of a small 1870’s dairy ranch operated by German immigrant Heinrich Hoppe and Anna Schuman Hoppe