With its deep-water channel and access to the San Francisco Bay, the Tiburon Peninsula has been a prime location for fisheries, ship-building and naval bases since the indigenous Miwok came to these shores. With the arrival of the Spanish in the eighteenth century, the Tiburon peninsula was given its name and would become part of the Mexican land grant, Corte Madera del Presidio. That land was granted to Irish-born John Thomas Reed who had become a naturalized Mexican citizen and married the daughter of the Presidio commandant. Reed’s daughter, Hilarita, and her husband, Dr. Benjamin Lyford, tried to develop the peninsula into a utopian community but never found enough investors. In 1877 the couple sold some of their land on the eastern side of the peninsula to William C. Lynde and Howard M. Hough, of the codfish firm Lynde & Hough Co. The company imported Alaskan cod to sell in California and canned the fish to sell on the East Coast where it was made into cod-liver oil. The firm ran a thriving business for almost 30 years.
In 1904, the U.S. Navy purchased the cod-fisheries land, docks and buildings to construct a Pacific Coast coaling station for their fleet. Large coal storage bins were constructed along with a large ‘gantry’ crane for loading the coal and existing wharves were enlarged. Within a few years the station was handling up to 35,000 tons of coal per month. In 1908, it provided the fuel for Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet visit to San Francisco Bay that circumnavigated the globe and established the United States as a major sea power.
With the conversion of the Navy’s fleet to oil-burning vessels, the fuel depot was decommissioned in 1931. During most of the 1930s the site was leased by both the John A. Roebling company that spun the cables for the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge and by the State of California for its Nautical School that would eventually become the California Maritime Academy.
In 1940, with the threat of war approaching, the U.S. Navy reclaimed the site and converted its use to manufacturing steel-cable submarine and torpedo nets. During WWII, the Tiburon facility manufactured more than 10,000 tons of netting along with the buoys needed to suspend them. A seven-mile net was stretched across the Golden Gate and incoming ships were escorted into the bay by net-tender vessels that could open and close the gates. Tiburon harbor nets were used to protect harbors throughout the Pacific theater of operations. Pictured above is the net that stretched seven miles from Sausalito to the San Francisco marina and another of workers repairing a net. These photographs of African-American naval personnel were taken during the Korean War after President Truman had desegregated the Navy. The Navy decommissioned the depot in 1958 and the site is now the home of the Romberg Tiburon Center for Environmental Studies along with both Paradise Beach Park and the Tiburon Uplands reserve.
(Originally appeared as History Watch article in the Marin Independent Journal)
Object IDs P1999.6963 and P1999.6964