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When I started my volunteer position as Research Librarian for the Marin History Museum in the fall of 2021, I knew very little about the history of the county where I was raised and lived for most of my adult life. I came to the MHM to catalog and make accessible the hundreds of books, reports, and other printed materials donated to the museum, a literal pile on top of a long work table at The Boyd Gate House. The very first book I cataloged was an 1880 edition of History of Marin County, California by J.P. Munro-Fraser, as it seemed to be the oldest and most significant book within reach. I cataloged the book, encased it in an archival box, and began to work on the rest of the collection. Occasionally, I would find reference to the work when researching Marin’s history, but never gave the book or its author much thought. In November 2023, I was contacted by an author who was writing a book centered on J.P. Munro-Fraser, and she was hoping I had some background information on the author of the 1880 book. She even speculated that because she couldn’t find any information on her own, J.P. may have been a woman who used her initials to get her works published. I couldn’t find much information for her, except that a J.P. Munro-Fraser had authored several other books on local California history: Solano County (1879), Sonoma County (1880), Santa Clara County (1881), Contra Costa County (1882), and Alameda County (1883). Munro-Fraser’s work on Marin County history continued to be cited in newspaper and magazine articles a century later, but none of them gave any insight to the author. Weeks after our email exchange, I was still contemplating the question of “Who was J.P. Munro-Fraser?” and decided to do more digging. John P. Fraser was born on March 10, 1841 in Tain, Scotland, to Donald Fraser, a painter, and Margaret Munro, and died on March 27, 1899 at his home in Portland, Oregon. According to his obituary, he spent the first 18 years of his career as a civil servant of the British government in China, where he developed his skills in writing for publication. By the late 1870s, he had arrived in California and was employed by the San Francisco publishing firm Alley, Bowen & Co. to research and write the first of his California histories. News articles from that time describe him working “surrounded by piles of reference works” and that he was “an easy, graceful, and interesting writer, and his history can not but find favor with all lovers of good English.” In January of 1880, the Marin Journal reported that Munro-Fraser was staying at the Central Hotel on Fourth Street in San Rafael, and that “Every family in the county will be visited … every nook and corner will be ransacked for historical relics, the old and young will be asked for reminiscences, while not a stone will be left unturned, so that reliable data may be procured.” The volume was finally published by November 1880, and the author wrote in the preface: “...a true and unvarnished record of Marin county has been our aim, and we think we have succeeded in bringing to light much that would otherwise have remained in darkness.” The local histories produced by Alley, Bowen were not “put upon the market” but were supplied only to patrons on a subscription list. These limited edition volumes became the histories of record for the areas they covered, and before they were later reprinted and digitized, they were valuable and rare. In January 1962, the Independent Journal reported that the county library notified the sheriff to report that their copy had been stolen. “It was the heart of our county historical collection,” said librarian Virginia Keating. J.P. Munro-Fraser moved to Oregon and there produced two more histories, on Lane County, Oregon (1884), and Clarke County, Washington Territory (1885). Before his death, he had produced sketches of other Oregon counties, perhaps to write a history of the state, but ill health prevented him from completing the work. He left behind his wife, but had no children. His obituary in the Portland Oregonian ends with this tribute: “Those who knew him intimately say he was highly cultured and a gentleman in every sense.” Little did he know that his quickly produced history of Marin would stand for decades as the most important record of our county. For anyone interested in reading a digitized copy of History of Marin County, you can find it at archive.org and books.google.com. |
