On July 10, 1902, twin boys were born to a Mill Valley family at Hahnemann Hospital in San Francisco. Kent and Elliot Seymour would go on to become, respectively, an insurance broker and an attorney, both prominent in Marin County civic life for decades. But in 1975, when the Mill Valley Public Library's Oral History Committee sat them down to record their memories, what the interviewer wanted to know was what the town looked like when they were young.
Throckmorton Avenue, circa 1910. A delivery wagon from San Francisco's Emporium department store makes its rounds in front of 116 Throckmorton. The signs in the background advertise lots for sale. (Photo courtesy of the Lucretia Little History Room, Mill Valley Public Library)
The streets were unpaved. In winter they were several inches deep in mud. The sidewalks were wooden boardwalks, two planks wide, with a handrail, covered with frost in the cold season. Two blocks from the family home on Oakdale Avenue, Buena Vista Avenue served as the neighborhood skating rink because it was paved and Oakdale wasn't.
The old railroad depot - a Victorian building with the stationmaster's residence above, on the site of what became the bus station - had a wall of pegs just under the roof. Each commuter who caught the early train to San Francisco had an assigned peg. He left his lantern there in the morning and picked it up at night. There were no streetlights. "If you left a lamp there today," Kent Seymour said in 1975, "it wouldn't be there twelve hours later."
In the summer of 1907, Mill Valley ran out of water. Water was turned on for one hour each morning. Schools closed for more than thirty days. Families who could leave town were asked to do so while the situation was managed. The Seymours spent thirty days in Inverness. When Elliot recalled this in 1975, he noted there was a prediction of another water shortage that year in Marin County.
In those early years, the brothers said, people went away for the summer and never locked their doors.
Sources: Kent and Elliot Seymour oral history interview, Oral History Collection. Lucretia Little History Room, Mill Valley Public Library.
