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MILL VALLEY HISTORICAL SOCIETYThis week in Mill Valley history: The town’s first newspaper
On August 12, 1893, a 16-year-old named Frederick Runyon published the second-to-last issue of Mill Valley's first newspaper. The Mill Valley Times had been coming out every other Saturday since June, about 6 by 8 inches, 10 pages, priced at five cents. His father financed it. His newsboy was Joe Thompson, brother of the novelist Kathleen Norris, who sold papers on the streets and, according to Runyon, "did right well, too."
Miller Avenue looking north from the Eastland train station, circa 1893, the summer Frederick Runyon published Mill Valley's first newspaper. (Courtesy of the Lucretia Little History Room, Mill Valley Public Library)
The paper covered Millwood, Mill Valley, Blithedale and the surrounding districts. It reported on the deer, the hotels, the odorous sewers and the fire company's quarrels. It published a story about flies biting children that attracted considerable comment — and was later substantiated when a man named Charles Dowd was bitten and his arm swelled in about ten minutes.
The August 19 issue was to be the last. "It is with pangs of regret that we do not continue this work," Runyon wrote in his closing editorial. "The field is new, the prospects good and the circulation has grown steadily."
Wheeler Martin in the doorway of his grocery store at Throckmorton and Bernard, 1890s - the shop the Mill Valley Times noted stood "opposite the fountain." (Courtesy of the Lucretia Little History Room, Mill Valley Public Library)
Runyon left Mill Valley in 1907. He had served in the Spanish-American War, taken part in the town's incorporation in 1900 and been the first person raised in Mill Valley Lodge No. 356. He went on to edit the San Francisco Call, the Los Angeles Times, the Pasadena News and the Nevada State Journal in Reno. He eventually co-founded the Pasadena Independent, a free-distribution paper supported by advertising, staffed cooperatively by 160 people. He called it a new idea in journalism.
In 1940, when the Mill Valley Record put his old hand press on display at its new offices, Runyon wrote from Pasadena to congratulate them. He noted that his partner and he were installing a Goss high-speed octuple press capable of running 84,000 32-page papers per hour. "This is a far cry from the hand press upon which the Mill Valley Times was printed," he wrote.
Frederick Runyon died in Pasadena on March 13, 1944, at the age of 67, of a heart attack. The Mill Valley Record ran his obituary.
Sources: Mill Valley Record, Oct 22, 1927, Mar 1, 1940, Mar 16, 1944; Marin Journal, June 3, 1920; Mill Valley Historical Society vignette, May 2021 (mvhistory.org).
This story was sponsored by the Mill Valley Historical Society. Visit their new website at mvhistory.org.
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