The Source: the dog days of Dogtown

It’s always nice to live in an area with an attractive name. For example, various neighborhoods throughout the Bay Area have “Park” or “Heights” or “Vista” attached to them.

But there’s always an exception to the rule – and Dogtown in Marin County may take the prize for Least Attractive Name, as KALW’s Steven Short tells us in this installment of The Source.

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STEVEN SHORT: Pity the poor real estate agent who has to try to convince a client to pay a hefty Marin County price to live in a community officially known as Dogtown!

Today, this tiny cluster of homes – official population, 32 – hardly merits a name. But Ellia Haworth, Assistant Director of the museum in neighboring Bolinas, says Dogtown was the center of things in the 1860s. And before that…

ELLIA HAWORTH: There was a summer colony here before there was a town. There were big hotels, right there, on the lagoon.

The area we call Bolinas today was just called The Point. That’s where ships loaded and unloaded passengers and supplies. The only way to reach The Point was by ship. Roads would come later.

People who worked in the area had their businesses and homes in Dogtown. Haworth says there was a hotel, a wagon shop and a carpenter shop, plus other businesses associated with the untamed West.

HAWORTH: I imagine it was pretty wild. And at one point there were, I think, seven saloons in this corner of town, so they called this Jugtown.

“Jugtown” is understandable – but another prominent characteristic of the place led to the unofficial name of this settlement. Haworth reads from a Marin County Journal story printed in 1865:

HAWORTH: “It’s quite a settlement and is known under the cognomen of Dogtown, being so-called, we presume, from the immense number of canines which infest the place.”

People keep dogs as pets now, but then, they were work animals.

HAWORTH: You have to think of what the land was like then.The land was filled with life. There were thousands, thousands of animals. Thousands of quail. Thousands of fish, endless, endless streams of birds. I always say that the land was noisy out here with life.

Because many times it is now. There’s nothing compared with what it was. So hunting was a really big deal. So they brought hunting dogs.

Hunting was necessary for survival. Not only did it provide food, but also protection.

HAWORTH: There were bears everywhere. There were brown bears and there were grizzly bears everywhere in this area. So the early settlers who first met the Miwoks commented on great scars on bodies of some of the Miwoks who had a run-in with the bears, because they were unavoidable.  

Now, while it was prudent to have packs of dogs around, it’s recorded that the many single men living here realized …

HAWORTH: “… that the name Dogtown hindered prosperity and attracting women.”

In fact, it was noted in a letter to the editor of the Marin County Journal that there was “not a single unmarried woman or girl of marriage age in the whole school district of twenty families.”

Elia Haworth reads from a meeting notice, published in December 1868.

HAWORTH: “To deliberate on the expediency of the proposition to make sausage of all the dogs, choose a more virtuous, modest and sweet-scented word of a warbling sound as a name more suitable for our thrifty little town of decent inhabitants.”

Isn’t that marvelous? And so they chose the name Woodville. The change seems to have had positive benefits for the community.

HAWORTH: Pablo Briones, who was the doctor for the whole area, lived in Dogtown. The first Bolinas School was in Dogtown.

It’s not recorded whether they were attracted by the sweet-scented new name, or the sweet-smelling dog sausages, but more families did, indeed, move to Woodville.

HAWORTH: So then it was Woodville, and it was Woodville officially, and I think it was on the maps as Woodville until the 1970s.

The name never really caught on, though. People still called it Dogtown, in spite of a century of official recognition. A petition drive in the 1970s actually got the name changed back. Why? Haworth says – people here really like dogs!

HAWORTH: Our town has refused to have the leash law. We still have dogs everywhere, and they get along. They very rarely have any dogfights, and if they do, everybody breaks them up. But it’s sort of a never ending history here.

And speaking of history, she says, call it Dogtown or Woodville, or whatever you want…

HAWORTH: But it’s still part of Bolinas. In fact, they share our zip code, and it is part of this history, but it is often forgotten.

Yet, if the good citizens of Dogtown want to go by that name, it’s probably wise to let them.

In Dogtown, I’m Steven Short for Crosscurrents.