There will be many ways to celebrate Larkspur's centennial this year, starting with the big birthday party that attracted more than 1,000 residents, past and present, at Hall Middle School gym on March 1 - the date in 1908 when Larkspur's incorporation as a city became official. The Larkspur Library will celebrate the Centennial on May 17 with events for all ages, and the Larkspur Food and Floor Festival on June 1 will feature historic photos and other mementoes. Formal history-related activities will culminate on September 13 when the Rose Bowl Dance that made Larkspur a popular destination for 50 years returns at the historic Escalle Winery. But it is also possible to revisit Larkspur's good old days on neighborhood walks, thanks to city and citizen efforts to identify and preserve many of the homes and commercial buildings where the infant city took its first steps.

     Free guided walks of historic Larkspur are scheduled for two Saturdays in April. On April 12, Dick Cunningham will lead a walk through Larkspur's downtown, where sites and buildings span more than 150 years of activity. Then on April 26, Sue Cunningham will lead a walk in Baltimore Canyon, where Larkspur's recorded history started with a Gold Rush company that established a lumber mill there. Information on the tours, along with details on other centennial events, can be found in the Larkspur Recreation & Community Newsletter and elsewhere on the City of Larkspur website.

     It was a quiet beginning. Larkspur's pending birth as a city was overshadowed in the local press by front-page headlines trumpeting the creation of Muir Woods as a National Monument. News that the U.S. government had accepted William Kent's gift of 295 acres of virgin redwoods occurred in the same weeks that members of the Marin County Board of Supervisors decided to "go out and have a look" at the boundary lines for the proposed City of Larkspur. On January 9, 1908, the Marin Journal reported that the "majority of the board favor granting the petition for incorporating Larkspur."

     Three days after incorporation became official, five men acting as a board of trustees met to elect temporary officers, pending an election, and to select a permanent "headquarters" for their meetings. The homes of all five still stand, and the site of their meetings next to the Blue Rock Inn on Magnolia Avenue, although the original building was torn down in the 1950s, is easy enough to find. Of special interest is the former blacksmith shop at the corner of Magnolia and Cane St., occupied in 1908 by the new town marshal J. Frank Murphy and his formidable wife Katherine. The building now houses the Silver Peso.

     The trustees elected Frank Craig, a San Francisco coffee broker, as their first chairman. Craig lived in the house he had built in 1898 at 160 Madrone Avenue and called "The Catalpas" after the flowering trees he planted next to his home. Craig was apparently a cantankerous fellow as his fellow trustees voted him out of the chair a year later although he objected so strenuously that he had to be removed from the meeting by Marshal Murphy.

     William J. Kennedy, who replaced Craig as chairman, lived at 130 Magnolia in a bungalow designed by Larkspur's master builder Gustave Nagel. John T. Foley, who convened the first trustees meeting, lived in a typical canyon summer home at 87 Madrone. Foley gave way to Craig in that first vote, thus earning the distinction of serving the shortest term as chairman (or mayor) in Larkspur history. However, Foley was returned to office in June of 1909.

     A.E. Woods, who succeeded Foley as chairman in 1910 and later became city clerk, lived in a house at 19 Walnut Avenue that had been constructed for him in 1907. The most colorful - and tragic -- member of the original board of trustees was Baron Wilhelm Von Meyerinck, who arrived in Larkspur with his unconventional Baroness just before the great earthquake of 1906. Their turreted house at 33 Myrtle Avenue remains a Larkspur treasure. While the Baroness devoted herself to music, the Baron became active in the community and served on the board until July 16, 1909, when he committed suicide. Evidently he was distraught over the closing of the San Francisco bank where he worked.

     A first order of business for the trustees was to find a permanent place for meetings. They settled on the large hall above a paint shop in the Lynch Building, a long structure on Magnolia next to the Blue Rock. The trustees met there until 1913, when the present City Hall was finished. Until it was demolished, the Lynch building was the home of Larkspur's first movie house, the post office, and at one point a training facility for prizefighters.

     Minutes of the early meetings of the trustees reflect great concern over the operation of bars and taverns in the town, which had developed a reputation for wild behavior on weekends. One of Marshal Murphy's first duties was to learn the dates when liquor licenses for the town's establishments were to expire and to ensure that they were renewed. At $300 a year, liquor licenses were a major source of income for the city. But by 1919, just before Prohibition became the law of the land, the city was ready to restrict sales of alcohol anywhere except at a bar-and to prohibit sales to women after 9 p.m. on Saturday nights.

     Murphy also was charged with controlling Larkspur's animal population. An ordinance adopted in 1910 made it unlawful "for any person or corporation to ride, drive, or lead any horses, cows, mules or any large animals upon the sidewalks." Failure to heed the ordinance was punishable by a fine of $25 or 25 days in jail. In 1911 the trustees authorized the issuance of dog licenses and ordered any dogs running at large to be impounded and killed if they weren't claimed after three days.

     It wasn't long before the need for a real City Hall was evident. On January 3, 1912 the trustees ordered a special election to approve "incurring a debt" of about $15,000 for the construction of "a public assembly and convention hall." The Mission Revival building, designed by San Francisco architect Charles O. Claussen, cost a total of $15,100.50 and was dedicated on April 20, 1913. Early council meetings were held in what is now the library while the second floor became a recreation hall where movies were shown and plays and musical shows were performed. Visitors to today's City Hall will find the walls covered with historic photos and documents.

Click here for a complete Centennial Year Calendar.