Celebrating 150 Years of Service
The City of San Rafael is celebrating its 150th anniversary, honoring our rich history, vibrant culture, and bright future! Throughout this year, we’ll reflect on key moments from San Rafael’s past, highlighting the people, events, and milestones that shaped the city into what it is today.
For more on the anniversary celebrations, visit cityofsanrafael.org/150-year-anniversary.
Marin’s Cow Town “Cleans up” and Incorporates (by Pamela Klein)
In 1871, shortly before San Rafael’s incorporation, the Marin Journal described the town of six hundred residents as follows:
San Rafael is the county seat of Marin County, which is emphatically a “cow county,” for the chief business of the people is dairy farming, and no county in the State is equal to it for that kind of business.
To keep things in perspective, Shafter and Howard, a San Francisco law firm, owned most of the Point Reyes peninsula during the 1850s and had twenty farms with a total of 8,000 cows. By the 1860s, Marin County was producing 25% of the butter in the State of California. From the beginning, Marin County provided ideal grazing conditions for cattle. During the 1830s, the Spanish settlers of Marin raised longhorn beef cattle that ran feral from San Rafael to the coast, but the demand for beef during the Gold Rush caused the longhorns to be rounded up and sent to the Gold Country in 1849, and their grazing lands were taken over by dairy farmers.
By 1874, San Rafael visitors and residents were frustrated with the unsightly and unsanitary condition of the town which had many transient hotels, bars, and billiard parlors lining its main streets. An editorial in the Marin Journal on January 15,1874 urged the incorporation of San Rafael and the improvement of town government, in order to attract a better class of visitors and permanent residents.
We believe no better inducement could be offered at the present time than a well-managed town government, clean streets, well drained and with dust laid in summer, sidewalks and trees. We have a corporation bill before the Legislature at the present time. We need a corporation at once. We have water, but we cannot plant trees in our streets while cattle roam at large. We have streets, but they need grading and sidewalks. We have filthy and decaying matter; and these can only be gotten rid of by a long sewer running to tide water—and if not gotten rid of, we will soon lose our reputation for healthfulness.
San Rafael was incorporated on February 18, 1874. On April 9, 1874, San Rafael’s new Town Council passed the City’s first ordinance – Ordinance No. 1: Relative to Animals Roaming in the Streets:
The Trustees of the of the Town of San Rafael do ordain as follows:
Section 1 – on and after the 20th day of April 1874, it shall be unlawful for any person to permit or suffer any horse, mare, colt, calf, bull, ox, mule, ass, sheep, goat, hog or pig to run at large in the public streets now opened or hereafter to be opened within the corporate limits of the town…
The miscreant owners were subject to a fine of five dollars for each offense, the equivalent of about $140 today.
In June of 1878, San Rafael added Ordinance No. 12: An Ordinance to Prevent Offensive Trades and Occupations:
No person shall establish or maintain within the town of San Rafael any slaughterhouse, or shall keep or cure hides, skins or poultry or dry out or melt down any fat or tallow, or slaughter any cattle, hogs, sheep or calves or any other animal, or carry on any business or occupation offensive to the senses, or prejudicial to the public health or comfort.
