Excerpt from Making Tracks:
The Marin Humane Society Celebrates 100 Years
In the beginning
1907-1957
Teddy Roosevelt was president. Rudyard Kipling won the Nobel Prize for Literature and Albert Einstein postulated that E=mc2. San Francisco was rebuilding from the disastrous earthquake of the year before. It was 1907.
Across the Bay, on December 14th of that year, rain and fog mingled on a typical winter afternoon in Sausalito. But something not at all routine was going on in W. H. Wilkins’ law office off Caledonia Avenue. Sixteen determined people sat together talking about animal cruelty and neglect. However, they were prepared to do more than talk, and before dark settled on the city’s docks and wharves, they had elected the Directors and Officers of the newly formed Marin County Humane Society.
F. C. Howard was named Interim President and the group agreed to meet again as soon as the Articles of Incorporation were returned from the Secretary of State in Sacramento. Ethel H. Tompkins was sitting quietly taking notes. Not an officer by her own choosing, Tompkins was the force behind the afternoon’s meeting. She was 31 years old, unmarried, shy with strangers and even shyer of cameras. However, her profound love of animals led her to act on their behalf. With her characteristic mix of eloquence and forcefulness, Tompkins helped lead the way in forming what would be one of the first charitable organizations in Marin County, and one of the earliest humane societies in the entire United States.
Miss Tompkins:
A Quiet Force for Animals
Born in San Anselmo in 1876, Ethel Tompkins lived in the same house until her death 93 years later. We do not know a great deal about Tompkin’s life. When she died in 1969, the local Marin Independent Journal biographical file had almost no details about her life. She had shunned publicity her entire life and refused to even permit pictures to be taken of her for publication. She refused, also, to submit to interviews.
True to form, in 1951 at the age of 75, when Tompkins was voted “Outstanding American Humanitarian” by a national humane organization, she declined an invitation to go to New York to accept the award. Instead, it was given to her in a simple ceremony at the Marin County Humane Society office. She seemed embarrassed by the attention and left the award behind after the presentation.
“It was,” she said, “not proper for a lady’s name to appear in a newspaper.” Apparently, she would then chuckle and say that the idea was old-fashioned and obsolete, but that she couldn’t help it.
However, everything that can be gleaned from transcripts of interviews with family members and anecdotal stories points to not only her grace and generosity, but her powers of persuasion and uncompromising advocacy for that in which she believed. And the lady believed in animals.
Marin Independent Journal editors in a 1969 editorial about her death addressed the enigma of her private nature and personal authority. “Miss Tompkins was a true lady,” they wrote. “One just doesn’t disagree with a lady who commands, deservedly, full respect.”
However, Ethel Tompkins was not a rigid Victorian. In 1894, she was expelled from an exclusive girls’ school on Riverside Drive in New York City. She tossed a note from a dormitory window to a policeman who rode a beautiful chestnut horse along the parkway below. “Can I ride your horse?” she queried and he signaled affirmatively. Leaving the school without permission, she was seen riding the horse in the park. Soon suspended, she made her way back to Marin without regret.
During the difficult years of the Depression, she would tolerate no shortcuts by livestock haulers who trucked cattle through Marin without stopping to water the animals. More than once, she blocked the road and forced the drivers to provide care to the cows on the long trip to the Central Valley.
In early 1908, Tompkins launched fundraising initiatives for the Marin County Humane Society with the same relentless determination. She and her sister, Mrs. Windham Carey, would go from business to business, home to home, and office to office soliciting $1 annual subscription donations. In 1912, it was hundreds of these contributions that funded the Society’s $429.90 annual budget, including the $150 salary for the Society’s first humane officer.
Finding a Home for the Young Charity
In 1912, Marin was a modestly populated county of 25,000, with large areas of open land for agriculture, ranches and recreational opportunities, such as hiking and camping. Many of Marin’s towns originated as vacation communities, with summer cottages sprouting up quickly in the early 1900s. Ferries transported large numbers of city dwellers seeking solace and refuge in the natural beauty that Marin offered, and many visitors came to stay. While much of the county enjoyed a relaxed, uncrowded feel, its towns, whose streets were nothing but dirt roads, bustled with commerce, saloons and livery stables. Automobiles were still a relatively new luxury, so horse-drawn carriages were the dominant mode of transportation. It was in this setting that the Marin County Humane Society set up its first quarters in the Nevada Stables on Petaluma Avenue (now Lincoln Avenue) in San Rafael. Dr. Rydberg, a veterinarian who doubled as the Society’s humane officer, operated the stables. Since the space there was small and had no room for kennels and cages, Ethel Tompkins had kennels built at her home in San Anselmo to care for stray and unwanted cats and dogs.
In 1927, the Humane Society rented an old shop at 812 Third Street in San Rafael. The fledgling charity had the $15 a month to rent the dilapidated shop, but no money to repair it.
Personal friends of Tompkins and the Board came to the rescue with donated time and materials. Volunteer carpenters, electricians and plumbers hauled in supplies from their own worksites and built the first Humane Society shelter in the evenings and on weekends. Evidence suggests that, on many occasions, Tompkins herself made up for shortfalls in funds by donating needed money, but always discreetly.
Marin was growing, however, and there simply wasn’t enough room for the mounting population of animals. In 1929, the Marin County Humane Society received a check from Mrs. William Babcock and, with money that was sent as a birthday gift to Tompkins, the Society was able to buy the property that they were renting on Third Street and Grand Avenue in San Rafael. By purchasing the property, they could enlarge their facilities. Fundraising began again and, in 1930, an expanded shelter was constructed, to be followed in 1949 by the acquisition of adjoining property and the dedication of a kennel-office facility on June 14, 1951. The Society was entering middle age.
The Difficult Years
The interim years had been difficult financially and philosophically for the young animal charity.
The focus of much of the work between 1907 and 1937 was horses and livestock. Riding and carriage horses provided transportation, streets throughout Marin’s towns were lined with hitching posts, and every other corner hosted a stable. Horses were often overworked and underfed, while livestock management reflected a laissez-faire attitude about sick and injured cattle and sheep. In addition, the railroad then running through Marin often carried livestock and the conditions in the cattle cars were poor.
With the increase in population that came with construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, there also came an influx of pet cats and dogs. The demand for services was simply greater than the Society could address. In 1938, the Humane Society still had only one employee, Scott Tilden, who “was doing all any one man could possibly do and was obliged to neglect much necessary work. There is a need for another man and permanent office help, and a new ambulance,” observed the Board of Directors.
However, with the Depression, donations were down and, with the wars, able-bodied men were unavailable. Moreover, the Society’s wages were not enticing. Every few months, the Board would try to raise Tilden’s wages $4 or $5, if donations permitted. But even with funds scraped together, iron for kennels was in short supply. The nation was rationing everything from tires to rubberbands in support of the war effort. Humane Society volunteers scavenged metal from lawn furniture and farm equipment and then had it fabricated into kennels, one at a time. A new ambulance was out of the question and repeated applications for a permit to buy a new vehicle were rejected by the War Office.
With the end of World War II, Marin’s neighborhoods were growing rapidly, and the Society was pressured by the incorporated cities and the County Board of Supervisors to take on “pound” work. The population of 80,000 was expected to increase to more than 100,000 people by the late 1950s. Animal problems were rapidly becoming an issue for local governments.
The 1951 Third Street expansion was a direct result of the Society’s controversial decision in 1946 to take on animal services for the cities and County of Marin. Up until then, there were no public shelters for stray or injured animals in the county. The decision to accept responsibility for animal control was one that the Society’s Board made solely in the animals’ interest, despite dissenters who felt that a humane organization should avoid the taint of “poundkeeping” (not a popular or well-regarded undertaking at the time).
As the 1940s came to a close, the Society became concerned about the care most dogs and cats were receiving at municipal shelters around the country. They resolved to maintain autonomy, hoping to set an example, and to establish particularly high standards of care as the County’s poundkeeper. The Society decided not to accept any public funding for the shelter expansion and the Board raised funds for almost four years, building the new Third Street facility in stages — $16,000 at a time. The high quality of care provided to animals was unique for shelters at the time, and built a legacy that continues to this day.
Order Making Tracks
Links
Marin Humane Society Milestones
2007 Schedule of Events
Centennial Press Release
Photos
Centennial Introduction - It's our birthday!
