Front View of a House on the RR – about 1900.
Side View of a House on Miller – 1903.
In 1900, most of the fairly new houses on the northeast side of Miller Avenue were on lots that extended back to Corte Madera del Presidio Creek.
Many lots were vacant. The houses had city water and sewage laterals connected to the sewage main that took sewage to the Bay.
Several houses had not yet been connected to electricity and telephone services. Lighting was often by kerosene, coal oil or networked gasoline lamps.
Heat came from burning wood, coal or oil. Cook stoves burned coal, wood, or kerosene. Kitchens had iceboxes. The ice came from the Sierra.
A narrow dirt service road, a wooden sidewalk and the railroad tracks were between the houses and Miller Avenue. The dirt road was often muddy in the winter and dusty in the summer, but horse manure was routinely removed.
There were no streetlights. Several times a day, noisy steam locomotives belching wood smoke would pass by. The nearby Millwood stop provided frequent train service to the Sausalito ferry terminal.
It took only 50 minutes to get to the ferry building at the foot of Market Street in San Francisco.
(This glimpse of life in Marin was compiled by the Mill Valley Historical Society. You can find more at MarinLocalNews.com and on mvhistory.org.)
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