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MILL VALLEY HISTORICAL SOCIETYThis week, students across Mill Valley head back to school. 118 years ago, they were doing the same.
On Monday, Aug 3, 1908, seventy students filed into a rough-board structure with a canvas roof on a sloping knoll near Mill Valley Junction and began the first day of classes at Tamalpais Union High School. The permanent $30,000 building was under construction next door. Contractors promised it would be ready in six weeks.
Tamalpais High School's first classroom, known as "The Shack." Rough boards with a canvas covering, built on one corner of the school site while the permanent $30,000 building was under construction next door. (Courtesy of the Lucretia Little History Room, Mill Valley Public Library)
The opening was attended by a large number of interested citizens from Mill Valley and Sausalito - the two towns whose school districts had joined to create the new school. Principal Ernest Everett Wood gave a short address that the Mill Valley Record described as "strictly to the point" and said it "created a very favorable impression among both his pupils and their parents."
The school existed because five students had petitioned for it. Before Tam High opened, students from Mill Valley and Sausalito who wanted a high school education had to commute to San Rafael. In December 1906, five students who were tired of the journey circulated a petition. The district was formed. Two years later, here they were.
The railroad platform outside was still being built on opening day. Train service began August 8, with the 8:17am from Sausalito and the 8:45am from Mill Valley stopping at the school, and return trains after 3pm in both directions. A $2 commutation rate for students had just been negotiated.
By 1926, after the Ross Valley districts voted to join the district rather than tie with San Rafael, enrollment had reached 952, with 98 courses and 47 teachers. A five-car train called "The Special" brought students from as far as Fairfax each morning - two cars for boys, two for girls, one coed - through the tunnel in Corte Madera and backed into the Tam High stop next to the gym.
Tam High in 1929 - two decades after seventy students started class in a canvas-roofed shack on the same site. The railroad tracks running alongside the campus carried students from across southern Marin each morning. (Courtesy of the Lucretia Little History Room, Mill Valley Public Library)
Not everyone came by train. Boyd Stewart, who attended from 1918 to 1922, lived on a 500-acre dairy ranch in Nicasio. Each morning he rode a horse five miles to San Geronimo to catch the 6am steam train, transferred at Manor to the electric train, got off at Almonte and walked up the County Road to school. The return trip brought him back to San Geronimo at 6:30pm for another five-mile ride home.
Ernest Everett Wood remained principal for thirty-six years, retiring in 1944. He was there on December 8, 1941, the morning after Pearl Harbor, when he addressed the school in Mead Theatre in a voice choked with emotion.
Mill Valley's two grammar schools - Summit School on Cornelia Avenue and Homestead School, which had opened just months earlier in Homestead Valley - reopened the same week after summer vacation, with 335 students enrolled on the first day and thirty or forty more expected through the month. Several classrooms were already crowded to capacity.
That first week of August 1908, three schools were running in Mill Valley: almost 400 students in two grammar schools and a brand new high school in a canvas-roofed shack.
Sources: Mill Valley Record, Aug 7, 1908; Mill Valley Historical Society vignettes: Tamalpais High School (September 2014), Tam High Expansion (December 2013), Tam High Early 1940s (October 2021).
This story was sponsored by the Mill Valley Historical Society. Visit their new website at mvhistory.org.
Sponsors pay for placement, not coverage. Our reporting is always produced independently, without sponsor review or editorial input.
