By Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society
Felecia Gaston, who founded Performing Stars of Marin and The Marin City Historical and Preservation Society, has brought out a new book about the history of Marin City, titled “A Brand New Start . . . This is Home.” In the following lightly edited excerpts, Felecia recounts how the evolution of Marin City was part of a larger socioeconomic phenomenon known as The Great Migration:
PHOTO COURTESY OF SAUSALITO HISTORICAL SOCIETY
WWII housing in Marin City
The Great Migration was the mass movement of about five million Southern Black people to the Northern and Western areas of the United States between 1915 and 1960. During the first wave, the majority of folks moved to major Northern cities such as Chicago, Illinois, Detroit, Michigan, Pittsburgh, and New York.
By 1942 the manpower shortage had already hit the Bay Area. Like Southern California, whose manpower supply had been depleted by the aircraft industry hurriedly built there, Northern California was too sparsely populated to support with local labor the demands of the shipyards springing up in Alameda, Richmond, Hunters Point, Vallejo, and Oakland, to say nothing of the labor needed on the docking facilities in Oakland, San Francisco, and Treasure Island. Now Marinship would make further demands on an exhausted labor supply.
In early 1942, the demands of World War II brought a great need for shipbuilding. To meet this demand, the U.S. shipbuilder W.A. Bechtel Co. built a shipyard at a former North-western Pacific Railroad repair yard situated in Marin County, at the north end of Sausalito, California, three mile (5 km) north of the Golden Gate Bridge. With its location at Richardson Bay, the shoreline in the vicinity of the proposed shipyard was uncluttered. It had no official name while it was being built but was referred to as the Marin Shipbuilding Division of W.A. Bechtel Company, and that lengthy title was shortened to Marinship which we now know today as “Marinship.” The loss of some ships in the Pacific by the Navy triggered an emergency need for even more ships by their customer the Maritime Commission. Using this as their legal reason, the company took government war powers (condemnation actions) against local property owners in order to add the additional land they needed to expand the shipyard. With only two weeks notice, the many residents of Pine Point, a quaint knoll located along the edge of the bay, were forcibly evicted by 28 March 1942. About 42 homes and buildings were removed. Pine Point was dynamited. At least 12 homes avoided demolition by being rapidly moved elsewhere in Sausalito. As a result of the rapid shipyard expansion the creation of Marin City began. Housing for 6,000 was created in Marin City, along with supporting schools, stores, and churches. Workers eager to take advantage of the well-paying wartime jobs migrated to the West Coast from all over the United States to work at the various shipyards, including Marinship.
World War II created the same kind of social dislocation in Marin that it did elsewhere in the nation, but with a special twist due to her bay site position and the absence of industry in the county. Men went to war, gas rationing throttled traffic across the Golden Gate Bridge, the proximity of so much of the Pacific Fleet and the boom in ship building gave farmers and ranchers more market than they could fill, wives were under special pressure to enter wartime employment, and an influx of outsiders flooded the county. The personnel at Hamilton Air Force Base was increased tenfold and families of San Francisco military personnel preferred rural Marin to The City. San Francisco Bay was crowded with ships at anchor. Ferry boats, overloaded with the increased labor force needed in a major port city, with commuting service men and city-based employees of Marinship, ducked in and out of warships as they piled back and forth from Marin to The City.
Marinship began running buses of its own across the bridge and then converted to contracting with Greyhound lines to bring the labor force to the yards. But providing transportation does not solve the problem of supply and demand.
First, you have to get the workers. Recruitment in the Midwest from St. Paul, Minnesota to Galveston, Texas in the deep South began in the summer of 1942. The response to such wage offers brought many hands off farms in those regions; men who had never known that kind of income hurried by bus, train, or rattletrap to that place called Sausalito in the county called Marin. Marin looked aghast at this multitude to be housed temporarily, of course. Hopefully, once the war was over, they would take their money and go home. And hopefully their families would keep home fires burning and not follow their husbands and fathers to Marin. The latter hope was eliminated immediately; few families remained at home, even temporarily.
Felecia goes on to relate Marin City’s postwar history, right up to the present time. Her well-researched and lavishly illustrated book will be available soon at Sausalito Books by the Bay and Book Passage.