When Sawmills Flourished in Larkspur
by Richard Cunningham
No trace remains of two bustling sawmills that operated at the edge of today’s downtown Larkspur in the 1850s. One represented an extraordinary investment of federal funds — costing more than $280,000 — and the other was a glory of private enterprise, yet both were gone completely by 1854. What happened?
Only months after cessation of war with Mexico, an Assistant U.S. Army Quartermaster decided to develop a local source for lumber needed at San Francisco’s Presidio. That Quartermaster was Captain Joseph L. Folsom (who later founded the city that bears his name); he selected redwood groves near the water’s edge in today’s Larkspur and Kentfield. Folsom quickly arranged with J.R.B. Cooper, the absentee owner of the Rancho Punta de Quintin, for timber-cutting rights and a location to build a lumber mill. Within months a small horse-powered sawmill was erected and operated by military personnel, and by October of 1847 its single circular blade was producing a limited quantity of lumber.
An Army report described the location: “The mill is placed in the timber known as the Red woods, near the mission of San Rafael, on the west and north sides of the bay, where any amount can be had.” A later report extolled the virtues of the arrangement: “There is no woodland in California so easy of access — no place from which the Government can derive a supply of lumber at so low a cost. This timber is situated on the borders of two ravines, distant from each other about three miles.” The milled lumber was hauled along a sawdust road and loaded directly onto vessels at nearby Corte Madera Creek, at a wharf on the saltmarsh behind today’s Hall Middle School. Initially shipped to San Francisco, the Government Mill’s lumber was later destined for the elaborate Army Depot being developed at Benicia.
At about the same time another primitive mill was operating on the neighboring lands to the south called San Clemente. In September of 1849 that little mill’s valuable timber rights were acquired by enterprising newcomers from Maryland who had arrived in the early wave of the gold rush. Those new arrivals — members of the Baltimore and Frederick Mining and Trading Company — brought along a technological marvel, a modern 15-blade steam saw mill. By the spring of 1850 their new mill was established at the mouth of a wooded canyon, and The Baltimore Steam Saw Mill inevitably bestowed its name on Larkspur’s Baltimore Canyon. Today that mill site is near Magnolia and West Baltimore avenues.
Convinced of the Government’s Mill’s potential utility, a new Assistant Quartermaster, Major Robert Allen (later to become a famed Brigadier General), arranged in 1851 for construction of a replacement mill powered by a steam engine. Maj. Allen explained: “The large size of the red-wood timber, the logs of which measure from five to ten feet in diameter, requires . . . a mill of the most substantial character. By combining with this latter mill a planning, tonguing, and grooving machine, every variety of lumber which the public service may require can be prepared at an expense not exceeding one-half the market value.” The Army’s impressive new complex included a two-story mill structure about eighty feet long and twenty wide, a two-story stable one hundred by thirty feet, two separate buildings for a cook house and blacksmith, four substantial dwellings, and expansive fencing.
Together, the Government and Baltimore mills employed dozens of men, as sawyers, blacksmiths, loggers or teamsters. The federal census of late 1850 noted several clusters of “lumber industry” residents, and in October of 1851 a San Francisco newspaper noted the “extensive sawmills” in the area, where “quite a little colony has spring up.”
The cost of the Government mill was alarming; Maj. Allen’s 1851 report to his superiors in Washington attempted to justify the outlay. Many things had changed since the smaller mill was built in 1847; poorly-paid military personnel deserted to the newly discovered gold fields, to be replaced by private labor that demanded exorbitant “miner’s wages” (labor at the mill cost $16,000 in 1851). A private contractor built and managed the new complex; he was Major Joseph Daniels, a highly respected veteran of the Mexican war who lost substantial money on the task. Land titles in the new State were poorly protected, requiring the mill operators to constantly occupy the premises. Finally, prices for lumber fluctuated wildly as schooners brought fir from Oregon and northern California. Eventually the Army decided to stop the bleeding; the newly built complex was advertised for sale in December of 1853, and apparently dismantled soon after.
Within a few years squatter-farmers occupied the Government site and its remaining structures; from the mid-1850s until the mid-1870s it was the farm and dairy of the Jonathan and Ann Bickerstaff family, and from the 1920s to the 1990s the location of the Niven Nursery. The general site is now adjacent to the intersection of Doherty Drive and Rose Lane; the mill’s road to the landing became the road and boardwalk at Boardwalk One.
In 1850 the Baltimore Company’s mill was purchased by B.R. Buckelew, an entrepreneur whose boundless optimism was matched only by his perpetual indebtedness. Buckelew selected experienced lumbermen to operate the mill with mixed results, but in early 1854 he moved the substantial hand-built structure to his lands at the tip of Point San Quentin, where it operated as a mill for another few years; the building itself survived until its accidental destruction by fire in 1929.
165 years after their departure, the only reminder of those robust sawmills are the groves of second-generation redwoods that endure in Baltimore Canyon and Kentfield. Imagine what the first trees must have looked like!
Originally published at https://annetkent.kontribune.com.
