The Links at
Sleepy Hollow

The Old Dutton Ranch

Long before anyone carried a golf bag up Butterfield Road, the valley at its head was cattle country. The local histories trace it to the Mexican land grant Rancho Cañada de Herrera, given to the presidio soldier Domingo Sais in 1839 and passed to his son Pedro, who leased the valley to a dairyman named Harvey Butterfield.¹ The San Anselmo Historical Museum dates Butterfield's lease to 1860 and says he fenced the land and built a ranch house there. The wagon road to "the old Butterfield place" became Butterfield Road.^2,1 The newspapers of the early 1900s used another name. When the property went to trial in 1920, the Mill Valley Record called it "Sleepy Hollow ranch, formerly known as the Dutton ranch," and the Marin Journal also wrote "the former Dutton ranch."^3,4 Who Dutton was, the papers do not say.

The land then passed to Anson P. Hotaling, the San Francisco whiskey merchant whose fortune came from the liquor trade.⁵ Exactly when is not clear. The San Anselmo Historical Museum says he bought it in 1887 and the Marin History Museum says 1889. Other retellings give other years, and no newspaper we have found records the sale.^6,1 What is certain is that by the end of the century the ranch belonged to the family company. Lavinia later testified that in his last months her husband set up the A. P. Hotaling Company, with quarter shares for his widow Lavinia, his sons Richard and Frederick, and Ella K. Hotaling, widow of the eldest son, Anson P. Hotaling Jr.⁷ In 1904 that company sold the ranch to a second family corporation, the Hotaling Estate Company.⁴

The road itself was a dead end, and a pretty one. In 1912 the San Anselmo Herald counted "the Butterfield road, or Hotaling road" among Marin's "blind roads." It ran about two miles northwest from the Fairfax road near Lansdale station, through rolling country that, the editor said, reminded English visitors of the Kentish Downs, and it stopped at the Hotaling ranch.⁸ The editor wanted it carried on over the hill into Lucas Valley. Nobody did that, and the valley kept its quiet. It would be the setting for everything that followed: a rich man's country house, a famous dairy, a string of resort schemes, and eventually a golf course.

Dick Hotaling's Country Place

The man who made the valley famous was Richard M. Hotaling, known to his friends as Dick. He was a clubman and an amateur Shakespearean actor, and he never married.^9,10 In December 1900, while he sat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the Marin Journal reported that he was "erecting a spacious residence on the 'Sleepy Hollow' tract a few minutes drive from San Rafael."¹¹ There were to be "numerous suites of rooms, each fitted with its own bath," a lawn with a running fountain and flower beds, and a stream dammed into an artificial lake "well stocked with speckled trout."¹¹ (The Marin History Museum's online timeline dates the mansion to 1890. The contemporary report points to 1900.¹) A builder's contract filed in October 1901 covered a second building, a "two-story frame ranch house with brick foundation on Sleepy Hollow Ranch near Fairfax," designed by an architect whose name is printed as Edw. L. Holmes.¹² That was probably a farm or manager's house rather than the mansion. The mansion's own architect was probably Edward L. Van Cleeck of Santa Cruz: in 1907 a Santa Cruz paper said Hotaling had given him "the magnificent residence and stables he erected at Sleepy Hollow," at a cost of more than $60,000.¹³ The 1900 residence was the house that, a generation later, would serve as the golf clubhouse. Its steps and foundation still stand at San Domenico School.

The name "Sleepy Hollow," borrowed from Washington Irving, was already in use in that first 1900 report. The local museums credit Richard with choosing it, which is probably right, since it first appears in print with his house.^11,14

Richard's house parties became a fixture of the society pages. Over the Fourth of July in 1902 he kept a large party at Sleepy Hollow for four days, and the San Francisco Call reported that "the days and nights passed in a round of merriment."¹⁵ In 1904 the Wasp contrasted the two Hotaling brothers. Fred was the dandy with a hundred suits. Dick "often wears a sweater about the streets," and "his hobby is 'Sleepy Hollow,' his beautiful country place in San Anselmo."¹⁶ That summer a Santa Cruz columnist passed along a story from Town Talk. Dick had once ordered his guests to come to dinner in fancy dress without leaving the house to find costumes. One woman pulled down the drawing-room lace curtains to make an eighteenth-century gown. Charles Field came with beetles in his beard, and Mark Gerstle came as a bare-armed baby.¹⁷ The actress Blanche Bates belonged to the set.¹⁷ The singer David Bispham stayed in 1910, and Frank Deering's family spent three weeks there in 1913.^18,19 A 1911 essay on California country-house hospitality said simply that at Sleepy Hollow "guests come and go constantly."²⁰

"His hobby is 'Sleepy Hollow,' his beautiful country place in San Anselmo."

It was also a family house. In the weeks after the 1906 earthquake "Mrs. A. P. Hotaling" was staying there, which could mean either Lavinia or her daughter-in-law Ella.²¹ The "Mrs. A. P. Hotaling and Miss Jane Hotaling" of the society columns a few years later were almost certainly Ella, the widow of Anson P. Hotaling Jr., and her daughter Jane. In 1909 the Call described the ranch as Mrs. Hotaling's "home, Sleepy Hollow, at San Anselmo," and mother and daughter spent the summers of 1910 and 1912 there.^22,23,24 Jane gave her own house parties at the ranch.²⁵ In 1914 Jane, "niece of R. M. Hotaling," was fined $10 for speeding through San Anselmo on her way back to the city.²⁶ Years later, in court, Lavinia herself allowed that she might have called it "Dick's home," because he made his domicile there.²⁷

The Marin Journal's New Year's feature for 1903 gives the best picture of the place in Richard's hands. No hunting was allowed. Pigeons crowded onto the owner's shoulders when he arrived, and a Chinese cook looked after the cats. Above all there were the cows. Hotaling "prizes, most of all, his herd of select Holstein cattle, each one of which he personally knows and has, for him or her, a pet name."²⁸ His sister in Switzerland had sent a dozen silver cowbells, each tuned to a note of the scale. The Journal added that with the herd lined up in the right order on the way to the barn, people thought the cows might be made to play "Old Hundred."²⁸

The Most Famous Cows in Marin

The herd was more than a hobby. By 1901 Hotaling was advertising Holstein bulls from his "Sleepy Hollow" herd in the trade press.⁶ In 1904 he won three prizes at the State Fair in Sacramento, which, the Marin County Tocsin said, "speaks well for the Sleepy Hollow Dairy at Fairfax."²⁹ The Pacific Rural Press reported in 1912 that Hotaling and his manager, Mr. Davis, had built the herd from Eastern stock and had at one time bred the world-record Holstein cow, putting forty cows into the breed's Advanced Register in a single year.³⁰ The Herald's editor wrote that same year that visitors drove the Butterfield road "to see the Hotaling dairy, which is known all over the world." Cows from the herd had been shipped to China, Japan and India.⁸

Then Richard stepped back. According to the Pacific Rural Press, "Mr. Hotaling's business was so active that he determined to rent his ranch and sell his cattle," and the deal went to "Messrs. Herzog of San Rafael."³⁰ S. K. Herzog was a San Rafael merchant who would soon be the city's mayor.^31,32 The date of the lease is not recorded, but Herzog was probably there from about 1906. The Herald said in July 1925 that Herzog had leased the Hotaling properties "for the past 20 years," and the Petaluma Argus-Courier said in 1926 that the dairy had been there "since 1906."^33,34 The earliest firm newspaper evidence is from September 1909. That month the Herzog family returned from "Sleepy Hollow, their summer place," and a chattel-mortgage release to a Meadow Dairy Co. covered "all property on Hotaling Sleepy Hollow Ranch."^35,36 In 1910 Herzog let his house on Fifth Street in San Rafael and moved the family out to "his country home, 'Sleepy Hollow.'"³⁷

The first year went badly. The Rural Press said Herzog tried to run the herd "with cheap help." Buyers found no one who knew the cows' names or breeding, and after a year he was $3,000 behind. So "Mr. Davis was brought back and a certified dairy established."³⁰ That was P. H. Davis, who was still running the dairy in 1924.^38,39 Certification meant tuberculin testing, and the first test "hit it a heavy blow." It also meant concrete floors, whitewash four times a year, a twelve-stall hospital for sick cows, and milkers in clean laundered suits. Springs in the hills filled an 80,000-gallon tank.³⁰ By June 1911 the S. K. Herzog Co. had an agreement with Ideal Farms "for the sale of certified milk from Sleepy Hollow Ranch."⁴⁰ That autumn M. Herzog brought two Swiss cows and a bull home from Europe to run with "the tested cattle there."⁴¹

The dairy made Sleepy Hollow a public name in a way Richard's parties never had. The Marin booth at the 1915 Exposition hung a painting of the county that included "a realistic view of Sleepy Hollow ranch," and Herzog supplied the milk poured beside it.⁴³ That October Mayor Herzog drove the visiting Golden Gate Commandery Band out to the ranch, where they were "shown how certified milk is produced."³² In 1917, after several of his hands were called up for the war, two young San Anselmo women joined his haypress crew at $3 a day. The Call reported it as "Mayor Herzog owns the Sleepy Hollow ranch at Fairfax."⁴⁴ He didn't own it. The ranch was still Hotaling property, and Richard himself was still listed in the 1915 Fairfax directory at "Sleepy Hollow Ranch."⁴⁵ Not everything about the place was idyllic. In 1913 the San Anselmo Woman's Improvement Club asked Herzog to help with the mosquitoes that hatched by the millions in the creek that ran through the ranch.^46,47

Mother Against Son

For almost two decades the arrangement held: Herzog's cows in the valley and Richard's parties at the big house. It broke apart in a family quarrel.

At the end of October 1918 Lavinia Hotaling, then in her seventies, sued Richard to recover 2,500 shares of family stock. Reached by telephone "from his ranch home at Sleepy Hollow," he called it "the best press-agent story of the year."⁴⁸ Two weeks later the family filed a second suit in Marin to quiet title to the ranch itself.⁴⁹ The question was a deed. Richard held a conveyance of Sleepy Hollow dated 1899, signed when he, his mother and Fred were the company's directors. He had kept it unrecorded for years and then recorded it.^50,51 Richard said it had always been meant as his home. His mother said it had been an emergency measure, to be recorded only if Anson's widow Ella married a German nobleman she was then said to be courting in Europe, so the ranch could not pass to a stranger.^52,53 Meanwhile the Hotaling Estate Company had carried the ranch on its books, paid the taxes and insurance, and spent some $106,000 improving it.^54,50

Richard's answer to his mother survives because it was read in court. "No, mother, you are wholly wrong," he wrote. "'Sleepy Hollow' is mine and I shall keep it." He said the ranch would go to Anson's children, Jane and George, for whom he regarded himself as trustee.⁵⁵

"No, mother, you are wholly wrong, 'Sleepy Hollow' is mine and I shall keep it."

The stock suit came first. In November 1919 Judge John Hunt gave Lavinia back her shares and noted that the ranch, "over which the whole trouble came up," was still in litigation in Marin.⁵² The Marin trial opened before Judge Edward I. Butler in San Rafael on 10 November 1920 and ran until 20 December.⁵¹ It aired the family's quarrels in public. Nurses testified about the elder Hotaling's last illness. Fred said he had been "dominated body and soul" by his brother. Richard's own lawyers brought out that he personally owned the dairy herd.^56,57 Estimates of what was at stake varied from paper to paper. The ranch was given as 2,200 acres worth $250,000 in 1919, and later values ranged from $125,000 to "approximately $1,000,000."^58,59,60

On 30 April 1921 Butler ruled against Richard. The 1899 deed was invalid because only three directors had been present, a bare quorum, and Richard, one of the three, had voted for a transfer to himself.^51,61 Life on the ranch went on. That May Herzog advertised for ten heifers lost from Sleepy Hollow Ranch, "branded on right shoulder with Dollar Mark ($)."⁶² Richard appealed, and in February 1922 he was still at "his Sleepy Hollow ranch" when he was served with papers in the stock dispute.^63,64 On 13 March 1924 the Supreme Court settled it: the ranch belonged to Lavinia, Fred and the Hotaling Estate Company.^53,60 The Oakland Tribune's columnist summed up eight years of litigation: the "million-dollar Sleepy Hollow family ranch" belonged to the company "and therefore is to be shared by the other heirs."⁵

A Ranch Without an Heir

The valley came through one more scare before the Hotaling era ended. In September 1923 a great fire swept from Woodacre through Lucas Valley "down to the rear of the Sleepy Hollow ranch." The Oakland Tribune reported that green lawns saved "the residence buildings on Sleepy Hollow ranch," which it called one of the county's show places.^65,66

The feud reached the papers once more in February 1925, when police described an alleged plot against Lavinia, Fred and Fred's wife. Richard denied through his attorney that he had any part in it, and the Tribune later reported that a grand jury had cleared him.^67,68 The wire stories that year still described Sleepy Hollow as "a valuable and productive property" that the courts had forced him to return to the estate.⁶⁷

The fight ended in 1925 with a compromise. The family's holdings were divided in equal shares among Lavinia, Richard, Fred and Ella.¹⁰ Title to the ranch "rested in the Hotaling Estate Company," and in July 1925 the papers reported that the company had sold it. The Herald gave the buyer as the Lang Realty Company, the acreage as 1,560 and the price as "nearly $200,000." The plan was five-acre homesites "with golf links and club house in the center."^33,69 Herzog, after some twenty years and with 300 cows in the valley, was given notice to vacate.^69,33 That story belongs to the next chapter.

Richard did not see what came next. He died in San Francisco on 14 November 1925, aged 57, after pneumonia and then influenza. The Tribune's obituary recalled the "famous 1600-acre Sleepy Hollow ranch in Marin county, the home of the family for years."^68,10 When Lavinia died in January 1929, her obituary said Richard had "passed much of his time at his famous Sleepy Hollow ranch."¹⁰

His house parties were over, but the house survived. So did the barns, the poplars along Butterfield Road, and the long open fields running up the valley that Herzog's cows had grazed. Those fields would be dug up for one golf course in 1925 and drawn up for another in 1929, and they finally opened as a public links in the 1930s. When that course opened, its clubhouse was Dick Hotaling's mansion.

Notice to Vacate

In the third week of July 1925 the San Francisco papers carried a real-estate rumor that Marin County had been waiting years to hear. The Sleepy Hollow ranch, "long one of the bones of contention in the many Hotaling family rows," was to become "a highly exclusive residential tract."^1,2 The buyer was said to be the Lang Realty Company, and the price was given as $250,000 for 1,600 acres.¹ The Lang office would admit only that "negotiations have been under way," and it gave no confirmation that the deal had closed.² The San Anselmo Herald, nearer to the ground, had slightly different figures: 1,560 acres for "nearly $200,000," bought by a firm "of San Francisco and San Anselmo."³

The plan was the same in every version. The ranch would be cut into five-acre homesites, and a golf links and clubhouse would be built.^1,4 The Herald's piece reads at times like a sales brochure. It described the valley as ideal for "higher class subdivisions, with golf links and club house in the center," with wooded slopes and a full view of Mount Tamalpais.³ So golf entered the Sleepy Hollow story at the very first announcement, nine years before anyone hit a ball there.

The news was harder on the people who were working the land. Sigfried K. Herzog, a former mayor of San Rafael, had run the Sleepy Hollow Certified Dairy on the Hotaling property for two decades, and he was given notice to vacate.^5,1 The Herald said he had leased the Hotaling properties "for the past 20 years" and kept a herd of 300 cows. It reported first that the sale would not disturb the dairy, and then, a few lines later, that the dairy might need new pasture.³ The Mill Valley Record noted that the dairy had "supplied children and hospitals with the best of certified milk," and said that residents hoped the business would stay in the county.⁵

The dairy did not go quickly. In April 1926 neighbors along Butterfield Road complained to the San Anselmo trustees about the smell and the discoloring of the creek. The county health officer and a state inspector found that the cause was drainage from the dairy's silos. "Mr. Davis, the superintendent of the ranch," promised to do whatever they recommended.⁶ That October the Herzog company bought the 2,200-acre Roseland ranch near Lakeville in Sonoma County for about $100 an acre. The Argus-Courier said the sale and subdivision of the Hotaling estate forced the move, because Herzog had been "unable to find in Marin county a farm and lands suitable" for his herd.^7,8 The paper gave the dairy's start on the Hotaling land as 1906.⁷ Building the new place took time. In May 1927 the "famous Sleepy Hollow herds" were still on the Hotaling estate, waiting for the Lakeville barns to be finished.⁹ By March 1928 Porter H. Davis was listed as "of the Sleepy Hollow Ranch in Sonoma County."¹⁰ So the herd itself probably moved north in 1927, about twenty years after Herzog had first come to the valley. The dairy took its name north with it, and from then on any "Sleepy Hollow" item in the Petaluma papers is about Lakeville, not San Anselmo.

Ground Broken

The golf course came first, at least on paper. In late September 1925 the Mill Valley Record reported that Lang Realty's purchase had closed the week before at $250,000. "A golf course will be developed on the tract immediately," the paper said, with a clubhouse to follow and the residence district later.¹¹ A few days later the Santa Rosa Press Democrat ran a short item headed "Marin Will Have New Golf Course." It said that John Clarke, "one of the famous golf course constructors in the country," had supervised the breaking of ground for a course on the Sleepy Hollow ranch, as part of a "highly restricted residential colony" in the valley.¹²

That paragraph is all the papers we have say about Clarke. The item does not give his home town, any course he had built, how many holes he planned, or where on the ranch his crew turned the first soil. No later account mentions him, and the course he began does not reappear in the papers. October 1925 is the earliest golf work at Sleepy Hollow that we can document, but we cannot tell whether it went any further than a ceremonial plowing.

Six weeks later the man most closely tied to the ranch was dead. Richard M. Hotaling died in San Francisco on 14 November 1925, of complications after pneumonia.^13,14 The Press Democrat wrote that he had "spent much of his time on his Sleepy Hollow ranch in Marin county, only recently sold."¹³ The Oakland Tribune's obituary went over nearly ten years of family litigation over "the famous 1600-acre Sleepy Hollow ranch."¹⁴ His mother, Lavinia, died in January 1929. Her obituary recalled that the 1925 compromise had divided the family estate equally among her, Richard, Frederick and Ella K. Hotaling, and that Richard had "passed much of his time at his famous Sleepy Hollow ranch."¹⁵ By then the Hotaling era in the valley was over.

The Del Monte of Marin

During 1926 the plan grew much larger than homesites around a golf links. In July the Herald reported that Lang Realty, "the present owners," was negotiating to sell to an Eastern syndicate. Lang would keep 500 of the 1,600 acres for homesites. The other 1,100 acres would become a resort "on the order of Del Monte," with a 200-room hotel, a 25-acre lake and "golf courses," plural.¹⁶ On 19 August the Press Democrat reported a sale of 1,609 acres to "an eastern syndicate." The August Land Syndicate of San Francisco was acting for the buyers, and well over a million dollars was to be spent, counting the purchase price (the figure is blurred in the scan).¹⁷ The Sausalito News picked up the Monterey comparison. It promised a "Del Monte of Marin county," to be called the Sleepy Hollow Inn and Country Club, only an hour from San Francisco.¹⁸

The building trade press supplied a name. Late that August, San Francisco's Building and Engineering News reported that "O. A. Broadway, representing Eastern capital," had taken an option on the 1,600-acre tract through Lang Realty. The plan was to spend $2,000,000 on a $500,000 hotel, a golf course, a polo field and an "artificial lake for boating and bathing." A $1,000,000 bond issue would pay for it, and $300,000 in junior bonds had reportedly been sold already.¹⁹ The news reached Chicago. That autumn the Hotel Monthly listed "Lang Realty Co. to build at Sleepy Hollow," at a cost of $2,000,000. The magazine mixed up its geography and placed the site "near Lansdale (P. O. Anselmo)."²⁰

Note what these sources call the buyers. Every paper and journal written at the time describes the money behind the scheme as "eastern." None of them names Chicago.

The county prepared for the boom. In July 1926 the supervisors took up a petition to improve Butterfield Road out to Sleepy Hollow, "the former dairy ranch made famous by the Hotaling family," which "will now be developed as a residence section."²¹ In March 1927 a Marin promotion page in the San Francisco Chronicle, as summarized by the Mill Valley Record, said negotiations were again "reported to be in progress" for a 200-room hotel, golf course and artificial lake on "the famous 1600-acre Sleepy Hollow ranch properties."²² That November the county let a contract for a wooden bridge on Caleta Avenue, near "the Butterfield road, which leads to the Sleepy Hollow Ranch."²³ In March 1927, too, the Herald printed a tall tale about "Scotty" McLaren, a hand on one of the dairies north of town. He was said to come into San Anselmo with his pockets full of gold pieces and nuggets, and older residents wondered whether he prospected "up in Sleepy Hollow."²⁴ It was that kind of year.

One golf architect of the first rank may also have walked the ground. The modern MacKenzie Chronology, compiled by Neil Crafter and others, says that around mid-1927 Dr. Alister MacKenzie and his partner Robert Hunter were apparently asked to look at a possible course site at the Sleepy Hollow ranch, a few miles north of the Meadow Club they were building at the time. The chronology says Lang Realty then planned an exclusive country club with a hotel and an 18-hole course.²⁵ Its evidence is a San Francisco Chronicle article of 15 February 1935, written when Polly Willard took up the land, which quotes the late MacKenzie on the terrain: "No one could miss on ground like this."²⁵ We have not seen that Chronicle article ourselves. The visit is probable rather than proven, and no MacKenzie plan for Sleepy Hollow is known. Willard himself was already a good golfer. In 1927 he was medalist at Harding Park's first club championship and lost the final.²⁶

By the end of 1927 it was no longer clear who owned the ranch. In December a Novato rancher, Bernardo Ariasi, sued O. E. Boadway, president of a Nevada corporation, the Boadway-Rivinino Company. Ariasi said Boadway had talked him into deeding over his ranch by claiming that the company owned the Sleepy Hollow ranch, "valued at $250,000." Ariasi said he later learned the ranch "is owned by Walter Graf," and that the Boadway corporation "did not have anything to do with it."²⁷ Boadway was probably the same man as the "O. A. Broadway" of the 1926 option: the two names differ by a letter or two, and both men are tied to the same ranch within about a year. But that is an inference. The papers we have say nothing more about Walter Graf, and his name comes to us only through a plaintiff's complaint.

Seven Stories at the Head of the Valley

In 1928 the scheme appeared again, this time as a set of architect's drawings. In October the Architect and Engineer reported that H. C. Baumann of 251 Kearny Street, San Francisco, had completed plans for "a $2,000,000 country club and hotel project" on "six hundred acres, formerly owned by the Hotaling Estate, at Sleepy Hollow, Fairfax." The plans included a seven-story hotel, a clubhouse, a power plant, a 200-car garage, golf links and a swimming pool.²⁸ The site was now much smaller, down from 1,600 acres to 600, which suggests the original scheme had already been cut back.

On 30 November 1928 a construction contract was awarded. The Press Democrat reported that Thebo, Starr & Anderton of the Sharon Building in San Francisco would build a "seven-story and basement, steel frame and concrete hotel building" costing $1,250,000. The owner was a corporation financed by the Western Management and Finance Company. Baumann was the architect and H. L. Mislikian (the name is uncertain in the scan) the engineer. The project was to have "a club house and golf course for which preliminary estimates are now being taken."^29,30 In April 1929 the Mill Valley Record said construction would begin "within forty days."³¹

The golf course came next. On 12 May 1929 the Oakland Tribune reported that William Watson, "the well known Los Angeles golf course constructor" who had recently rebuilt and completed the Oak Knoll course, had won the contract for "a championship length course in Sleepy Hollow, San Anselmo."³² It would be an 18-hole course of 6,640 yards on which "the creek will be crossed 18 times during the play," and a supplementary nine of 3,139 yards would be added.³²

"There will be a 6640 length 18 hole course in which the creek will be crossed 18 times during the play."

That June W. G. Weaver's Herald was hopeful about the summer. A front-page piece predicted "an era of expansion and prosperity," naming among other projects "the Sleepy Hollow hotel project, which entails the expenditure of millions of dollars" and would employ hundreds of men. "Confidential information," it said, "indicates that the project is practically assured."³³

The Quiet Years

After June 1929 the papers we have stop mentioning the hotel. We have not found a report that ground was broken for it, that steel was delivered, or that Watson's crew ever arrived, and there is no notice that the contract was cancelled either. The stock market crashed that October. Whatever the Western Management and Finance Company's corporation still planned in the valley, nothing more about it appears in the Marin papers.

The years from 1930 to 1933 are almost blank in our record. In the newspapers we searched, "Sleepy Hollow" in those years nearly always refers to Herzog's dairy at Lakeville or to Sleepy Hollows elsewhere. Herzog, for example, was described in 1932 as owner of the Sleepy Hollow ranch, meaning the Sonoma one.³⁴ One late look at the old place comes from a magazine. A Redwood Empire feature in California Arts & Architecture in early 1933 printed a photograph captioned "the hospitable old Hotaling place at Sleepy Hollow," which shows that the mansion was still standing and still known by the family's name.³⁵ The valley's next owners would make that house their clubhouse.

Later accounts made the story grander. In April 1943, when the ranch was sold again, the Petaluma Argus-Courier recalled that after Hotaling left a syndicate had been formed, with "a million-dollar hotel, a milelong lake and two golf courses" projected, until the crash blasted the dream.³⁶ In 1952 the San Rafael Independent-Journal repeated the hotel, the lake and the two golf courses in its history of the valley, and made the syndicate a Chicago one that had obtained title, with the land lying idle until 1935.³⁷ Later local histories repeated the Chicago version. The papers of the 1920s do not support it. They name an "eastern" syndicate, a Lang Realty option held by O. A. Broadway, and a hotel corporation financed by a San Francisco firm.^17,19,29 Some of the retrospective is accurate. The Herald in 1926 did speak of a lake and of "golf courses,"¹⁶ and Watson's 1929 plan really did call for a second, supplementary nine.³² The Chicago syndicate, though, appears to be a later addition.

In eight years the valley had been promised a golf links twice, a hotel several times, and a polo field and a lake at least once. Richard Hotaling and his mother had died, and the dairy had gone to Sonoma County. When Polly Willard came looking in 1934, nothing that had been announced since 1925 had been built, and the old Hotaling house still stood at the head of the valley.^38,35

A Golfer Called Polly

Through the 1920s the old Hotaling ranch at the end of Butterfield Road had been a place where plans went to die. Hotels, homesites and championship layouts had all been drawn and announced, and none had been built. As the Independent-Journal remembered it in 1952, the land and buildings then lay idle from the crash until the mid-1930s¹. The man who finally put grass on the ground was not a syndicate or a hotel company but a single San Francisco golfer with a nickname.

He was H. A. Willard, called "Polly" by everyone in Bay Area golf. A decade earlier the Los Angeles Times had noticed him as a San Francisco realty broker who won a match at the realtors' outing on the twenty-first hole². In 1927 he reached the semifinal of the Menlo Cup³, and that winter he was medalist in the first championship of the Harding Park Golf Club, where The American Golfer called him the "top favorite" before he lost the final to Ray Huntley⁴. He was, in short, a well-known public-course player who also knew how land was bought and sold.

The first word of his Marin venture came in a golf column, not a Marin paper. On 21 October 1934 the Sacramento Union told its readers that E. Byrne-Cavendish, whom it ranked near the top of Pacific Coast course designers, was directing construction of an 18-hole layout called the Sleepy Hollow Golf and Country Club. It placed the site, loosely, at San Francisco and expected the course to be finished in May⁵. Four days later the San Anselmo paper, then called the Marin Herald, had the local version. Ross Valley was to get a golf course on some 350 acres of the old Sleepy Hollow ranch, just outside the San Anselmo city limits. Behind it, the Herald said, stood Polly Willard, whom it treated as the final authority on the game. It would not be an exclusive affair: dues were to be low enough for any enthusiast. Options had been taken on the land, and an outright purchase would follow once a title search was done⁶. The paper also remembered an earlier dream. Harry Ballou had once proposed a municipal golf course for Marin as a war memorial and handed the plans to the American Legion, but the Depression had smothered the idea⁶.

Within two weeks the numbers began to wander. The Petaluma Argus-Courier reported on 6 November that Willard had actually started building a sporty 18-hole links on about 160 acres of the Hotaling estate. It would be 6,666 yards long and cost close to $50,000. The Hotaling mansion would be remodeled as a clubhouse and dining place, and a swimming pool and tennis and badminton courts were planned. The ground was so suited to golf, the paper said, that only two of the eighteen greens would need to be built up artificially, and two were already finished and ready for seed⁷. Two days after that the Herald, calling Willard one of California's premier golfers, said he had acquired a tract of 100 acres for public links at a small green fee, with a golf club attached. The course was being seeded, and he hoped to open it the following June⁸. So within a fortnight the papers had given the project 350 acres, 160 acres and 100 acres. The likeliest reading is that the larger figure was the land under option and the smaller ones the playing ground, but no paper says so.

On 23 November the Mill Valley Record gave the venture its lasting name. It would be called the Sleepy Hollow Golf Course, the first public course ever built in Marin County. Willard was described as the promoter of several of the most popular courses in the Bay region, the investment was put at about $50,000, and E. Byrne-Cavendish, described as the builder of some of the finest courses in California, was in charge of construction⁹. The papers never named the several courses Willard had promoted, and none has yet been identified.

The lower valley was already being sold off in lots as Sleepy Hollow Acres. That December a Marin pistol club was holding its monthly shoot on a range there¹⁰. Golf would be the attraction at the head of the valley, and houses would fill in below it.

There may have been one more endorsement. The MacKenzie Chronology, a modern compilation of the work of Dr. Alister MacKenzie, quotes a San Francisco Chronicle article of 15 February 1935 about Willard's plan. That article describes Willard as a former figure skater, an avid golfer and a San Francisco realtor, and quotes the late MacKenzie on the Sleepy Hollow ground: "No one could miss on ground like this."¹¹ We have not seen the Chronicle page itself, so the quotation stands on the chronology's word.

Greens on the Hotaling Meadows

Building the course took longer than one winter. On 5 June 1935 Willard told the Argus-Courier that thirteen of the eighteen greens had been graded and leveled and were ready for seeding. The paper called him the builder of Marin's first public course, which, it said, occupied the heart of the old Hotaling estate. It added that the Hotaling mansion would be remodeled and opened again as a gathering place for the people of the county¹². That was a change in tone. The country house built for Richard Hotaling's private parties was now promised to the public¹².

Grass needs water, and in central Marin water meant the Marin Municipal Water District. In July 1935 Willard appeared before the district's board, at the same meeting where it turned down an offer for Phoenix Lake, to ask for a more favorable contract to water eighteen greens and fairways¹³. He came back in October. The San Anselmo paper, garbling his initials as D. J. Willard, now described him as in charge of construction and reported that he asked the board to declare its policy toward the project. He said the finished course would use 40 million gallons a year and would compare well with championship courses anywhere in the country. He also asked for more time to complete it and offered a letter guaranteeing a bond¹⁴. The papers do not say what the district decided. Water bills would come back to haunt the course.

After that the trail goes quiet. The newspapers we have say almost nothing about Sleepy Hollow for the six months after October 1935. Whatever was happening on the ground over the winter, nobody wrote it up.

Pay as You Play

The silence ended in April 1936 with a corporation. On Thursday, 23 April, the secretary of state issued a charter to Sleepy Hollow Properties, Inc., and the Argus-Courier announced that Marin was assured of its fifth golf course and the first in the district to run on the pay-as-you-play plan. The incorporators were Willard, who the paper said had first conceived the idea, George V. Kaenel and Charles McLaughlin¹⁵. Kaenel was a prominent San Rafael businessman and civic worker and a former president of the chamber of commerce, who had become interested in the project several months earlier. McLaughlin was a San Francisco attorney who had held executive posts in golf for years^15,16. The same day, the paper said, all contracts to complete the 18 holes were signed, and the first load of pipe for the water system that would keep the greens and fairways in grass was landed on the job. The hope now was to open no later than early September¹⁵.

A week later the promoters gave the Herald a fuller picture. The championship course would take its cue from the famous links at Del Monte, and a handsome clubhouse would cater to the most discriminating diners and drinkers in northern California. The paper described the whole project as a subdivision with a golf course at its center¹⁷. The Sausalito News gave the warmest welcome. It congratulated Kaenel and his associates on acquiring the old Sleepy Hollow properties from the Hotaling estate. Swanky country clubs, it said, were beyond the average wage earner, but such a person could find the price of an occasional game at Sleepy Hollow¹⁸. That was the promise of the place in a sentence: golf for people who did not belong to a country club.

Fire in the Hollow

The summer of 1936 brought the worst day in the course's history. On Saturday afternoon, 27 June, a brush fire swept about 30 acres of Sleepy Hollow Acres near San Anselmo. The firemen fought it by carrying five-gallon cans of water. Captain Robert "Bert" Meagor of the San Anselmo fire department, 27 years old, became separated from the others and was burned to death. Another fireman, Paul Chirone (the name is hard to read in the wire story), was badly hurt^22,23.

A week later the Argus-Courier reported that Marin authorities believed a small boy was setting grass fires in the district for the thrill of watching the engines race to them. There had been a rash of fires along Butterfield Road near the San Anselmo city limits over ten days, two within one 24-hour period, all started in tall dry grass. The officers thought they knew who the boy was. They also suspected him of riding a horse across the newly seeded greens of the new golf course²⁴. The paper said the fire that killed Meagor was believed to be one of these deliberately set fires²⁴.

The golf company responded quickly. When the Marin County fire chiefs met in Ross in early July and stood in silence for Captain Meagor, George Kaenel and Willard, identified as officers of the Sleepy Hollow Golf Club, were in the room. Kaenel asked for the chiefs' help in the Sleepy Hollow district and promised that special fittings would be given to every department so that any fire crew could tap the course's new water lines²³. The pipe that had arrived in April to keep the greens alive was now offered as a hydrant system for the whole hollow. The fires did not stop. Six acres in what the paper called the Sleepy Hollow subdivision burned on Friday, 17 July²⁵, and in late August a ten-acre grass fire burned right up to the edge of the new course before three departments with five engines stopped it²⁶.

Meanwhile the opening date kept slipping. In mid-July Kaenel told the San Anselmo Lions that the course would be ready by 1 October, when everyone would be welcome²⁷. In September he told them that a formal opening of course and clubhouse was hoped for at the end of the month or early October²⁸. By late October the Marin County firemen's association had booked its December meeting at the new Sleepy Hollow Golf Club at Kaenel's invitation, which is the first sign we have of the clubhouse being used for anything²⁹.

A Unit at a Time

The course opened in stages, beginning in the week before Thanksgiving 1936. The Argus-Courier announced on Saturday, 21 November, that golfers would be cutting divots at Sleepy Hollow for the first time the next day, when a driving and practice green would open. It lay directly east of the old mansion and could be seen from the windows of what the paper called the spacious circular cocktail lounge. All eighteen greens and fairways had been planted, but the developers preferred to wait a few more weeks to let the grass mat before heavy play. Inside the mansion, lockers, dressing rooms, showers, a kitchen and dining room and two bars were nearly finished; one bar was for diners on the main floor and the other was in the locker room. The whole layout was promised before Christmas³⁰. The Mill Valley Record's weekly summary said the driving green opened on Saturday and named Kaenel as the operator³¹, so the papers disagree by a day.

Two weeks later Kaenel and Willard (the Argus-Courier printed him as Poppy) announced that the first nine holes would open the following Saturday. The paper does not make clear whether it meant 5 or 12 December 1936. The driving range, they said, had been in almost constant use for a fortnight. The first nine lay east of the drive up to the clubhouse. The first tee was a few feet from the clubhouse and close to the ninth green, all the greens were grassed, and the centers of the fairways had a strong cover. The paper printed the card: a par-36 nine of 3,440 yards, with a 435-yard first, a 410-yard second, a 375-yard third, a 475-yard par-5 fourth, a 325-yard fifth, a 360-yard sixth, a 455-yard par-4 seventh, a 215-yard par-3 eighth and a 400-yard ninth³². Those holes add up to 3,450 yards, not 3,440, so either the total or one of the yardages was misprinted. It was a long, demanding nine: seven par-4s, three of them over 400 yards, and only one short hole. The second nine, west of the driveway, was expected within a month³². By 1940 the cards printed in the Herald gave par as 37 out and 34 in. The outward pars ran exactly as in 1936 except at the first hole, now a par 5, so the opening hole was probably lengthened or re-rated, but no paper says what changed³³.

The second nine took longer than a month. In March 1937 the Herald reported in a single line that it had opened and that the first nine had been closed for a while to rest the turf³⁴. Then, on 15 April, came the front-page notice: all eighteen holes would be thrown open to the public on Sunday, 18 April 1937, and the course was said to be in splendid shape³⁵.

"it will be operated as a public links, not a private club."

The Mill Valley Record's notice the next day is the most quoted and the least reliable item of the whole story. It said the Sleepy Hollow Golf Club would reopen on Saturday under new ownership, with H. A. Willard in charge. It called the course the second longest in the United States and said it had "a driving range of 6666 yards," which is plainly garbled: 6,666 yards was the length of the course, not of the range. It added that the course had an actual nineteen holes, the last a short, difficult hole for settling ties, plus a driving range, and that more improvements were planned³⁶. Two parts of this need care. The figure of 6,666 yards first appeared in November 1934, before any fairway was cut, as the planned length⁷, and by December 1938 the Herald was giving the course as 6,500 yards³⁷. The claim to be the second longest course in the country was a promoter's boast that no one appears to have checked. And the mention of new ownership, with Willard still in charge, hints at a change among the owners over the winter that the papers never explain.

Whatever its length, the course was quickly put to use. On 19 May 1937 Marvelous Marin, the countywide chamber of commerce, hosted sixteen hundred University of California seniors, who came over by ferry and spent the afternoon at a barbecue and on the golf courses at Sleepy Hollow and the Marin Golf and Country Club³⁸. Marvelous Marin had spent the spring preparing to put the county on the map before the Golden Gate Bridge opened³⁴, and Marin was competing for visitors from across the bay. A public course in the old Hotaling meadows was exactly the kind of thing it wanted to show them.

Sixty-Two and a Half Percent

The full course had been open for less than three months when the company that ran it went to court against its own founder. On Thursday, 15 July 1937, minority stockholders of Sleepy Hollow Properties, Inc. filed suit in Marin Superior Court to remove Willard as a director. He owned 62.5 percent of the stock. They asked that he be barred from re-election for two years and that the court appoint a receiver to run the corporation^39,40.

The complaint showed a business in trouble. It said the $30,000 golf course was operating at a loss and was behind on its water bills to the Marin Municipal Water District, which had demanded a $1,000 deposit as security and served notice that it would cut off service unless the account was settled. Without water, the plaintiffs warned, the grass would be ruined. Willard, they said, had refused to adopt progressive policies to put the club on a paying basis, despite the recommendations of the other two directors, George V. Kaenel and Charles McLaughlin. The corporation's debts were believed to be about $45,000^39,40. The water that Willard had bargained for in 1935, and that Kaenel had offered to the fire departments in 1936, was now the company's most urgent unpaid bill.

The complaint contained another fact that changes the story. The course, it said, was built on a leasehold from the San Anselmo Holding Corporation^39,40. In 1934 the Herald had written of options followed by an outright purchase, and of Willard having acquired the tract^6,8. In 1936 the Sausalito News congratulated Kaenel on acquiring the properties from the Hotaling estate¹⁸. But in July 1937 the operating company did not own the ground under its greens. It leased them, and the Herald never said who stood behind the San Anselmo Holding Corporation.

The plaintiffs were a roll call of local backers. Besides R. C. Doherty, whose name the case would carry, they included Frank Main, M. A. Graham, C. W. Caletti, C. R. DeWitt, Gordon Voorhies and others, along with George V. Kaenel himself and three more Kaenels: E. W. Kaenel, C. Von Kaenel and Miss C. Von Kaenel³⁹. The man who had become the public face of Sleepy Hollow was suing, alongside three other plaintiffs named Kaenel, to take control of it from the man who had first imagined it.

Three years earlier the Herald had promised a club with dues low enough for anyone, built by the last word on golfing. The golf part had largely come true. Eighteen holes were in grass in the old Hotaling meadows, the mansion had a cocktail lounge and two bars³⁰, and on the Sunday after the suit was filed more than a hundred golfers played the course⁴¹. The business part had not. Who would run Sleepy Hollow next, and whether it could pay its water bill, was decided in the days after the suit was filed, and that is where the next chapter begins.

Mr. Kent Takes Charge

By the middle of July 1937 the new course at the head of Butterfield Road had eighteen good holes, a mansion for a clubhouse, and a balance sheet nobody wanted to read. The minority stockholders of Sleepy Hollow Properties, Inc. had just gone to court to pry Polly Willard, who held five-eighths of the stock, out of the company. Their complaint said the course was losing money and owed about $45,000. It added that the water district wanted a $1,000 deposit before it would keep the sprinklers running on grass the course could not live without.^1,2

On Monday, 19 July, Thomas T. Kent took over. He was a well-known Marin realtor and a water district director, presumably of the same district that was pressing the course for its bills. Kent took charge of the golf course and the clubhouse under the reorganization plan the minority stockholders hoped would give the enterprise a fresh start. He told the Petaluma Argus-Courier that the course was open and busy, with more than a hundred golfers out on a single day. Willard left for San Francisco. Whether the clubhouse would open, Kent said, depended on how the negotiations went.^3,2

The lawsuit, Doherty v. Sleepy Hollow Properties, Inc., dragged on into the autumn. In October Judge Edward I. Butler warned both sides that whoever won would lose money. The case was moved to San Francisco, and the parties agreed to try to settle out of court. The Mill Valley Record still called Willard the principal owner and president.⁴ No paper we have found reports how the case ended. All we can see is the result. By the spring of 1938 the man running Sleepy Hollow was George V. Kaenel, the San Rafael businessman who had been one of the directors urging changes on Willard, and who was now president of both the company and the golf club.^1,5,6

In the meantime the mansion was not left empty. In December 1937 about 300 of Marin's younger set were invited to a costume party at the Sleepy Hollow clubhouse, given by five young hostesses who called themselves the Quints. The guests came dressed as babies.^7,8 In February 1938 the Herald announced that Pastori was coming ashore. Enrico Pastori had spent three years as chief steward on the Dollar liner President Hayes, and from early March he would run the Hotaling mansion on the links as the Sleepy Hollow Club. Pastori was a local name. His family had kept the well-known restaurant at Pastori Station, between San Anselmo and Fairfax, and its old building now housed the Marin School for Boys.^9,10

A Game for the Salaried Man

Easter Sunday 1938 fell on 17 April. It was a bright day, and the Herald's front-page columnist spent two or three hours of it at Sleepy Hollow, taking in the views and watching the golfers. The column is unsigned, but it was almost certainly the work of the editor, W. G. Weaver. Four days later he wrote it up. He noticed that golfers no longer dressed for the game as they once had, and that most now played in comfortable, ordinary clothes. He doubted that Marin people really understood what they had on Butterfield Road. Many towns, he pointed out, taxed their residents to keep up municipal courses no better than this one, and here it cost the taxpayer nothing.¹¹

"Our good friend George Kaenel and associates have taken this game out of the rich folks class"

The columnist had one complaint, and it was the road. The drive out to the clubhouse, he wrote, was one of the most beautiful in the county, but it was full of bumps. He did not know whether they belonged to the town, the county or a private owner, and he wanted whoever owned them to fix them at once.¹¹

The Herald was not the only one that saw value in the course. Lang Realty's Sleepy Hollow Tract was selling land beside it. In early May its sales manager, David S. Adams, reported that two San Francisco physicians had each bought a building site fronting on the golf course, one of one acre and one of two. Five buyers had applied for FHA home loans, and the tract office was advertising one-acre sites next to Sleepy Hollow at $650 an acre.^12,13 In August the tract's newspaper ads told buyers they could play where they lived in Sleepy Hollow, adding that the tract paid county taxes but no city taxes.^14,15

Kaenel's company then set about improving the golf. In May it hired Harold Sampson of the Burlingame Country Club as its adviser on course maintenance. Sampson kept his Burlingame job. He called Sleepy Hollow a fine modern eighteen-hole course that needed only slight alterations, which he said would begin at once.¹³

"It now has a number of the finest golf holes I have ever seen." (Harold Sampson, San Anselmo Herald, 12 May 1938)¹³

A week later Kaenel named Ray de Haven as the club's professional, in charge of all golf on the course and the driving range. De Haven had been at Del Monte and Pebble Beach, where he had served his apprenticeship under Sampson. He had also been pro at a club in Fresno, at the Wawona Hotel course and at the Feather River Inn.^5,16,17 The same week, Oakland Tribune readers saw an advertisement for an eighteen-hole course between San Anselmo and Fairfax, out of the wind and fog, with no crowds and no starting times.¹⁸ Members of the University of California's class of '38, 1,600 strong, spent a day in Marin, and some of them played golf at Sleepy Hollow and the Meadow Club.¹⁶ Over the last weekend of May, fifty players from San Francisco's Harding Park course came over for a sweepstakes. The Herald said it was the biggest play in the club's history, with the rough well kept and the driving range and clubhouse open day and night.¹⁹ By mid-June Sampson was described as being in charge. He told Kaenel the course was second to none in the state, and the whole property was thrown open to the public, with plans to make it a county institution.²⁰

Pastori, meanwhile, had renamed the mansion the Country Club Lodge. His first dinner dance of the season was on Saturday, 21 May, with music by the Serenaders, dinner at $1.50, dancing until one in the morning, and lunches and dinners served every day.¹⁶ The Sausalito News placed the lodge a mile and a half out Butterfield Road.¹⁰ The valley gained another attraction that year: according to the San Anselmo Historical Museum, a riding stable opened in 1938 at the old dairy site, later known as the Sleepy Hollow Riding Club and Sleepy Hollow Stables.²¹ The Herald's Sub Rosa diarist dropped in at what he called the Sleepy Hollow Tavern, was talked into seven holes of golf with friends, and admitted to a large score.²² On a Sunday in June the Pyramid Club of Oakland played a tournament on the eighteen holes while the members' wives played bridge in the clubhouse.²³

Lights on the Range

Pastori's time at the lodge was short. At the end of June 1938 the club announced new management. E. Boyd Stewart had been secretary-manager of the Rio Del Mar Club at Aptos for twelve years, and he now took complete charge of the course and the clubhouse. Mrs. Stewart, who had long experience with luncheons and banquets, was to assist him. (One Herald item prints his name as E. E. Stewart.)^24,25 The papers do not say why Pastori left.

Stewart and Kaenel moved quickly. The road from the end of Butterfield Road to the clubhouse was resurfaced, which answered the Herald's complaint. Floodlights went up over the driving range and the putting greens so they could be used at night. Walter Kinsler took over the dining room and the tap room, and the clubhouse was fitted out for parties of up to 200.^25,24 On 17 June Kaenel, as company president, gave notice that he would apply for beer, wine and liquor licences at the terminus of Butterfield Road.²⁶ Prices came down too. A late-June advertisement offered lunch at 75 cents, dinner at a dollar, and a Saturday dinner dance at a dollar with no cover charge.²⁷

The Fourth of July weekend brought the most golfers the course had yet seen. There were no tournaments, but hundreds of local and visiting players kept the course and the range busy every day. The clubhouse was full on Saturday night and on the Fourth, Stewart's new seven-course dinner drew praise, and benches had been set out on the floodlit range, which the Herald said was popular by day and by night.²⁸ That spring the Herald's front-page columnist, probably Weaver, had been given a set of golf clubs for Father's Day. He went straight out and played nine holes at Sleepy Hollow, kept no score, and lost two new balls.²⁹

On Sunday, 10 July, Sleepy Hollow staged its first exhibition with famous names. Frank Dolp, a five-time Oregon amateur champion and twice winner of the Western Amateur, partnered Mark Fry, whom the Herald billed as northern California's top golfer. Against them were San Rafael's Matt Palacio, the Northern California amateur champion, and Mark's brother Earl Fry, a former Northern California professional champion. The Herald noted that neither of the Frys nor Dolp had ever played on the Marin side of the Bay, and there was no charge for the gallery.^28,30,31 The Herald counted more than 150 spectators and the Healdsburg paper several hundred. Dolp and Mark Fry each shot 69 on the par-71 course and won 2 and 1, with Dolp holing several long curling putts. Afterwards all four players told Kaenel it was one of the sportiest courses they had played.^32,33 The Herald's gossip column wanted to know whether one of the great amateurs had chipped out of the creek cobblestones onto the fourteenth green with his hand.³⁴

Dolp came back for Labor Day, 5 September. This time he played with Slim Dreier, the Northern junior champion, against Palacio and Rob McGlashan, the Northern California intercollegiate champion. There was again no gallery fee. A surprise on the driving range followed, then a barbecue dinner at the garden barbecue pit and music, cards and dancing in the clubhouse.³⁸

A Procession of Professionals

The pro's job at Sleepy Hollow changed hands often. Ray de Haven, praised in July for a rise in interest and membership, is not mentioned after the summer.⁶ On 30 September Sampson returned to give a free lesson and lecture under the lights on the driving range, repeating one he had given in the spring. He had just come back from a series of exhibition matches as the partner of Ralph Guldahl, whom the Herald called the world's champion. His assistant that night was Jim Gordon, introduced as the new professional at Sleepy Hollow.³⁹ By mid-November Gordon had also gone. The Argus-Courier reported that Don Taylor, the former Vallejo professional, had become pro at Sleepy Hollow, and a Plumas County paper added that Taylor owned the golf course at Chester.^40,41 Taylor stayed longer than the others, and he was still the Sleepy Hollow professional in the summer of 1939.⁴²

The course got attention as well. After the autumn rains, tractors reseeded the fairways, and golfers took advantage of the warm weather and a newly announced cut in green fees.⁴³ On 27 November Taylor and Henry Espinoza played an exhibition against Harry Obitz and Joe Mortara, again with no gallery fee.⁴⁴

The clubhouse, meanwhile, had become a social centre for the whole county. In 1938 alone it held a Young Democrats dinner dance for 115 guests and a luncheon for 72 police chiefs of the Bay Cities Peace Officers Association.^45,46 The Ross Valley Players gave their cast party there after their production of Rip Van Winkle at the end of August.⁴⁷ Nearly 200 Lions gathered for a double charter night, and the Knights of Columbus held a charity ball, with Kaenel helping, to buy groceries and clothing for Marin's needy.^48,49 The Marin bankers brought 155 people to their annual dinner dance in December.⁵⁰ The club also ran its own parties. On Big Game Night it put on Roy McLeod's orchestra and a floor show, and on New Year's Eve it gave a party with balloons and noise-makers.^51,52

The biggest golf event of the year came on Monday, 12 December 1938. The Northern California section of the Professional Golfers' Association brought its annual pro-amateur championship to Sleepy Hollow. Taylor had arranged it with the section chairman, Dick Fry. Fifty to sixty golfers were expected, each team a professional and an amateur from the same club, playing their better ball from scratch over 36 holes. The Herald called the course a championship layout of 6,500 yards and invited the public to watch for free.^53,54 Harry Borg, the Petaluma club's pro, drove down to watch his friends play.⁵⁵ (The Associated Press story, datelined the 12th, puts the play on the day before, probably a wire slip: the Sacramento Union's report printed on the 13th dates it to the 12th, as the local announcements did.^56,57)

Willie Goggin of San Bruno and his amateur partner, Ed Hitzelberger, won with 69 and 65, a total of 134. Two strokes behind were Tommy LoPresti and Frank Toronto, and Mark Fry and Milton Ross of Oakland. Earl Fry and H. C. Welch of Alameda were tied with John Perelli of Lake Tahoe and the San Francisco auto dealer J. E. French Jr. at 137.^57,56 The afternoon 65 was not just a team score. According to the Associated Press, it was Goggin's own round:

"Goggin shot 65 alone in the afternoon round to set a new competitive course record." (Associated Press, in the Oakland Tribune, 13 December 1938)⁵⁶

That 65 stood as the course record. When Mark Fry equalled it in 1940, the wire services described it as Goggin's record, set two years earlier.^58,56

A Club of Its Own

By the new year Sleepy Hollow had players who wanted to represent it. On Sunday, 15 January 1939, about twenty-five members of the Petaluma Golf and Country Club came to San Anselmo for the first of a home-and-home series. Taylor and Stewart had planned it with Borg and the Petaluma captain, Walter Rossi, and the visitors were given lunch by the Sleepy Hollow members.^59,60 The Petalumans found the course tricky and heavily bunkered, with very fast greens and traps on both sides of the fairways that punished any crooked drive. They struggled over the first nine and did better on the second, but Sleepy Hollow won. The home side scored 31 points, and the Petaluma total is unreadable in the surviving copy.⁶¹ Five weeks later Taylor led about twenty Sleepy Hollow players to Petaluma for the return match. The hosts won easily, served a turkey dinner and had their revenge. Win Howe of Sleepy Hollow had the second-best score of the day.^62,63

In between, on the evening of Wednesday, 15 February, about fifty people met at the course and formed a golf social club. It was to work with Sleepy Hollow Properties, Inc. on entertainment and tournaments. Both the Santa Rosa and Mill Valley papers stressed that the course would stay open to the public. Taylor was the professional and Boyd Stewart the manager.^64,65 In March the club played host to the top twelve men on the Marin Junior College golf ladder.⁶⁶ The clubhouse kept up its civic role. Marvelous Marin, Inc., the county booster organisation, held a meeting there in March on the threatened end of the interurban trains, and in August it elected its new president there.^67,68

Lang Realty kept selling the valley as a place to live beside the course. In August 1938 the Herald reported that the company was planning a theme home in the Sleepy Hollow hills for the Exposition's Model Homes Tour.¹⁴ The house that was eventually built was an early-California ranch house, Home No. 6 on the 1939 tour, shown by Lang Realty and David S. Adams on an acre of land.⁶⁹

Not every visitor in 1939 came with clubs. At the end of May a fire broke out near the clubhouse, and a stiff breeze drove it across the hillside north of the club. It missed the course but threatened the night driving range before crews from the Tamalpais Forest Fire District stopped it. San Anselmo's fire trucks waited at the city limits in case the wind changed. The two papers disagree on whether it started on Tuesday or Wednesday.^36,37 In August Marin's archers were invited to shoot at fifteen targets set out along the course.⁷⁰ Two weeks later the Petaluma Archery Club held a roving shoot in the hills behind the course and then took on the golfers at archery golf. Each archer was paired with a golfer playing ordinary golf, and instead of a hole the archer aimed at a small target on each green. The golfers lost six down over eighteen holes.⁷¹ A Petaluma paper later added that the golfers' better ball had been several strokes under par, and they had lost anyway.⁷²

That autumn the women started a club of their own. On Wednesday, 25 October 1939, twenty-five women signed up at a dinner meeting at the course and formed the Sleepy Hollow Women's Golf Club. They elected Mrs. Frank Schrader captain, which also made her president, with Mrs. Paul Hartman as handicapper, Mrs. Jules Schneider as secretary and Mrs. Anto Rilovich as treasurer. Tuesday would be ladies' day, and once a month the women would be hosts to players from neighbouring clubs.⁷³ A week later Mel Schallock of Mill Valley won a Marin County title at Sleepy Hollow, beating Bob Miller 3 and 1 in the championship flight at the end of four weekends of play.⁷⁴

So the decade ended with the course in better shape than its owners' finances had ever been. In two and a half years Sleepy Hollow had gone from a lawsuit and an unpaid water bill to a public course with lights on its range and cheaper green fees. It had a resident professional, a men's social club, a women's club and a home-and-home rivalry with Petaluma, and its record had been set by a professional in a championship. It had become what the Herald hoped for on Easter Sunday 1938: a course for people of ordinary means. Who would run it next, and for how long, was another question. Within a few weeks of the new year the papers would be printing new names.

Two Landlords at the End of Butterfield Road

The new decade opened at Sleepy Hollow with two legal notices printed a fortnight apart in the back pages of the San Anselmo Herald. On New Year's Day 1940 Walter V. Lake gave notice that he meant to sell beer, wine and spirits at the Sleepy Hollow Country Club, at the terminus of Butterfield Road; this was the old Hotaling mansion at the head of the valley, where San Domenico School stands today¹. On 15 January George F. Finnin, who gave his home as the golf course itself, swore before a San Anselmo notary that he was doing business on his own account under the name "Sleepy Hollow Golf Course"². The certificate ran in the Herald every week until mid-February^3,4,5. So the place now had two proprietors, one for the dining room and bar and one for the links. The papers never say on what terms either man held his part. (The court papers of 1942 spell the golf man's name Finnan; he is the same man⁶.)

Lake was the one the public met. By the autumn the Herald called him manager of the country club, and it reported that he had found a four-year-old runaway from San Anselmo sitting calmly on the clubhouse's front steps⁷. That November his advertisements offered French and Italian dinners every evening, Sundays included, for a dollar⁸. The house earned its keep as a rented hall. The Lions held barbecues and dances in the grove behind it, and in September 1940 George Kaenel, one of the course's founders, was still presiding over the barbecue pit⁹. University women dined there, and so did the Council of Jewish Women, a Florence Crittenton bazaar and a graduating class from Sir Francis Drake School^10,11,12,13.

On the golf side the pro was still Don Taylor, who had come in late 1938. In February 1940 he talked golf to the San Anselmo Rotary Club, and the Herald said no one was better informed on the subject¹⁴. That spring he sat with two other pros to plan the California State Open for the Northern California P.G.A.¹⁵ The players' club, the Sleepy Hollow Golf Club, had Buzz Beattie as president¹⁶. In April it started a 72-hole medal competition for the Hughes trophy, played one round a week, each card signed by a fellow member¹⁷. The same month a Lions district tournament for eight clubs played one of its three rounds at Sleepy Hollow¹⁸. In May several thousand University of California seniors spent their annual playday in Marin, and some of them spent it golfing at Sleepy Hollow¹⁹.

The women's club, formed the previous October, had joined the North Bay Women's Golf Association. On Tuesday 14 May 1940 it was host for the first time: thirty-five women from Petaluma, Santa Rosa, Vallejo and elsewhere played the course and lunched in the clubhouse^20,21. The Petaluma paper found the course beautifully laid out²⁰.

A scorecard printed in 1941 sums up how the business sold itself. It called the course open to the public and put it in "Marvelous Marin" between San Anselmo and Fairfax, a thirty-minute drive from San Francisco. Under the slogan "Golf – Dine – Dance" it advertised a driving range and putting course open day and night. It named George Finnin as manager, with the same telephone number Lake used for the dining room^22,8.

The Week the Pros Came

The biggest week in the course's short life began with a committee. On 1 May 1940 the tournament committee of the Northern California Professional Golfers' Association walked all eighteen holes, and the Petaluma Argus-Courier headlined that the pros called it a fine course²³. Their section championship had never before been played in Marin County. Marvelous Marin, Inc., the county's promotional body, helped sponsor it, and Don Taylor was general chairman²⁴. The winner would take $500²⁵. The San Anselmo Rotarians had already promised to help the golf club entertain the visitors²⁶. The Mill Valley Record set the scene for its readers:

"Surrounded by rolling hills covered with many wild flowers and towering oak trees"

The Oakland Tribune warned that par here was a hard 71. It added that the defending champion, Mark Fry of Sequoyah, had shown his form in a practice round of 69 (the type reads 89, plainly a misprint)²⁸.

Qualifying was 36 holes on Sunday 26 May. Harold Sampson of the California Golf Club took the medal with 68 and 70 for 138, one stroke ahead of Art Bell of San Francisco and two ahead of Dewey Longworth of Claremont²⁹. Fry needed 143. He still had the best nine of the day, a 33 on the front nine in the morning²⁹. Taylor, the home pro, got in with 73 and 77²⁹.

Match play opened on Friday 31 May with two rounds, and the morning was fierce. Harry Bassler of Los Altos began eagle, birdie, birdie, eagle and was six under par after four holes³⁰. The card shows why: the 1st and 4th were par fives³¹. Even so, Bassler won by only one hole. Taylor beat Longworth 1 up, which pleased the home crowd, and then lost to Tom LoPresti of Sacramento 4 and 3 in the afternoon^30,32. Pat Markovich of Richmond knocked out the medalist Sampson on the 19th. Fry needed 19 holes to get past Everett Goulart, and Bell needed 21 to beat Fry's brother Earl³⁰.

On Saturday's semifinals Fry beat LoPresti 3 and 1 with a round of 65, made up of 33 out and 32 home³³. The United Press reported that he had tied the course record of 65 set by Willie Goggin two years before³⁴. Bell's match turned on the creek. He was one down on the 17th when Vito Machado of Antioch drove into it. Bell squared the match there and won on the 20th³³.

The 36-hole final on Sunday 2 June was the best golf the valley ever saw. In the morning Fry went round in 68, three under, and Bell in 70, and Fry led by one at lunch^31,35. In the afternoon Bell went out in 35 and came home in 31^35,31. He squared the match with a par on the 30th and birdied the next two holes to go two up^31,35. On the 34th, the short 16th of 185 yards, he put his tee shot fourteen feet from the hole and holed the putt for a birdie two and the title, 3 and 2^35,31. Bell's afternoon round was 66, five under par, against Fry's 72³¹. Bob Blake of the Tribune summed it up in a sentence:

"Art Bell's putter was hotter than the day."

The Tribune and the Mill Valley Record both called the 31 a new record for the back nine^35,36. The cards the papers printed are also the best record we have of the course's shape. Par was 37 out and 34 in, 71 in all. The front nine ran 5-4-4-5-4-4-4-3-4 and the back nine 4-4-4-4-4-4-3-4-3^31,33. That made three short holes, at the 8th, 16th and 18th, and only two par fives, both on the way out. This is not the par-36 first nine that opened in 1936, so the routing or the pars had changed in the meantime; the papers do not say how.

A Club at Full Stretch

Two weeks after the professionals left, the club gave a different kind of show. On 16 June 1940 a team of twenty-one men from the Petaluma Golf and Country Club came for the home leg of the clubs' home-and-home series. Sleepy Hollow beat them, and afterwards the two teams lunched outdoors on the clubhouse porch and then went out for another nine holes⁴². Petaluma reported the score as 35 to 29½⁴³. (Its sportswriters could not agree whether this was the second or the third year of the series^44,45.) In November Byron Lewis, the club captain, took the return team north. The hills of the Petaluma course beat the Marin men, who lost 52½ to 19½^46,47.

The clubhouse had a harder summer. On 18 May 1940 Mrs. Alice Voris, an elderly San Francisco woman, fell in the dining room and broke her hip. She blamed poor lighting and a change in floor level, and she sued Lake and the country club for $31,600^48,49. At the trial in November Judge Edward I. Butler directed a verdict for Lake. In December he reversed himself and ordered a new trial^50,51. We have not found how the second trial ended.

In October 1940 the course was host to the Marin County Amateur championship, sponsored by the Marin Junior Chamber of Commerce. The Petaluma paper called it the most ambitious golf tournament in the county^52,53. Buzz Beattie led the qualifiers with a 71⁴¹. Walter Rossi of Petaluma put him out 6 and 5 in the quarter-finals⁵⁴. Rossi in turn lost his semifinal to George Sabin, and John Palacio beat Byron Lewis 5 and 4 in the other one, which set up a 36-hole final on Sunday 27 October⁵⁵. The papers we have do not give the result. In the third flight a San Franciscan named Fred Seamon made eight pars in a row to win his final⁵⁶.

Palacio, a younger brother of the former Northern California amateur champion Matt Palacio, made his name a month later. On Sunday 24 November 1940 he won the club championship, beating Lewis 8 and 7 over 36 holes⁵⁷. In December the members elected Lewis president in Beattie's place, George Prydz vice-president and Paul Streck secretary-treasurer. Bill Higuera, the outgoing secretary, took over publicity¹⁶. In February 1941 the Northern California Golf Association announced that the Sleepy Hollow Golf Club had joined it, along with Sonoma and Watsonville^58,59.

Then the club lost its professional. On 7 April 1941 Don Taylor left to become pro at the Mare Island club in Vallejo, and his assistant, Clair Dunham, took over at Sleepy Hollow^60,61.

The spring of 1941 was the busiest the course ever had. The Marin Journal chose Sleepy Hollow for a tournament to mark the paper's 80th year, set for 17–18 May. It was 36 holes of handicap medal play for men, with hole-in-one, driving and putting contests and prizes from Marin merchants^62,63. Its results have not turned up. On Tuesday 20 May the North Bay women came back, sixty-two of them, forty-four to play⁶⁴. Freda Schrader won Class A on her home course, and the visitors sat down to a large luncheon in the clubhouse^65,66. That evening the men's club held its annual dinner in the same building. It was also a testimonial to W. M. Hughes, the trophy donor, and W. G. Weaver of the Herald was among the guests⁶⁷.

In June the club opened a second series, with Santa Rosa. George Prydz captained a team of about twenty, who lost narrowly, 21 matches to 19, on the Santa Rosa links⁶⁸. A week later, on 29 June, Petaluma came back to Sleepy Hollow and lost 29 to 22. The Petaluma paper had to admit that everything had gone right for its men except the golf⁶⁹. On Sunday 21 September Santa Rosa's champion Fred Schefer brought twenty players to the Marin course for the return match. Its result, too, is missing⁷⁰.

Smoke in the Valley

Not all the news from the valley was about golf. At 5:30 on the morning of Wednesday 7 May 1941 the old Sleepy Hollow ranch house burned to the ground. It was a big two-storey house a short way from the mansion, which, as the Herald reminded its readers, was now the golf club. J. A. Fagundes, his family and the men working the ranch, ten people in all, got out with little more than the clothes they had on⁷⁹. The district lay outside the San Anselmo town limits. The Tamalpais Forest Fire District answered the alarm, but it was equipped for grass and brush fires, not burning buildings⁷⁹. The Herald noted that the thirty-odd families now living in Sleepy Hollow had been asking for some time either to join San Anselmo or to pay the town for fire protection⁷⁹. The valley was filling with houses, and the cattle were still there too. Both facts would matter to the golf course.

That summer W. G. Weaver began to worry about the course's future in print. In his front-page column of 17 July 1941 he noted that some San Rafael people wanted the county supervisors to take over the old Marin Country Club as a public course. He reminded readers that months earlier he had urged the county to buy the Sleepy Hollow Golf Club, an eighteen-hole course that could then have been had at a fair price⁸⁰. He called Sleepy Hollow better placed for most of the county's people, and he urged the Ross Valley's civic bodies to push for the Sleepy Hollow deal if the supervisors showed any interest⁸⁰.

"With all its attractions, Marin really has few places to play; we need more."

Weaver's phrase "could have been had" suggests that the price had gone up or the chance had gone. Nothing came of the idea. In late September the Marin grand jury began to ask why the Marin Municipal Water District charged the county's three golf courses, Mill Valley, Sleepy Hollow and the Meadow Club, half the rate it charged other large users^81,82. The papers give no answer. Cheap water had kept the fairways green, and now even that was being questioned.

People were starting to leave. George Kaenel opened a real estate and insurance firm in San Rafael with Frank Healion, the former mayor of Fairfax, on 1 November 1941; the Herald's notice described him as one of the founders of the Sleepy Hollow Golf Club⁸³. That same evening Clair Dunham, now pro at the Santa Rosa Golf Club, was badly hurt when his car hit a tree on the Sonoma highway⁸⁴. If he is the Clair Dunham who took over from Taylor, and the name and trade make it very likely, Sleepy Hollow had lost its second professional within seven months. No successor is named in any paper we have found. Even before the war, the draft had reached the men who had worked there: in March 1941 Howard Capps, who had once been an assistant pro at Sleepy Hollow, left for Fort Ord as a selectee⁸⁵.

Last Rounds

By the spring of 1942 the country was at war, and the sports pages showed it. When the North Bay women opened their season at Napa in March, they cut their schedule to three meetings because of the tire shortage. Bee Brown, Aurel Schneider and Neva Meyers of Sleepy Hollow all won prizes that day⁸⁶. The same week the Santa Rosa paper reported that a women's championship at Pebble Beach would give defense bonds and stamps instead of cups⁸⁷.

The same sports page carried a small item that is easy to miss. Jim George had won the Sleepy Hollow Golf Club tournament the previous weekend with a gross 80, and Jim Hasse had taken low net, but the tournament had been played on the Sonoma golf course, as the Sonoma pro, Harold Stone, reported^87,88. Neither paper says why the club left home. Whatever the reason, it was a bad sign when a golf club with its own eighteen holes held its tournament in another county.

The women kept playing at home. In April 1942 four of them drove to Mill Valley for a North Bay day⁸⁹. On Tuesday 23 June the women golfers of the Sleepy Hollow Golf Club held a guest day, and Mrs. Rilovich won a play-off⁹⁰.

The course itself was in trouble. On Wednesday 1 July 1942 George Finnan of the Sleepy Hollow Golf Course asked the Marin superior court for $3,024.50 from J. A. Fagundes, the rancher whose house had burned the year before. He said Fagundes's cattle had strayed onto the course again and again and done it great harm. Twice, he said, he had the animals impounded under state law, and twice the defendants had let them out during the night^6,91. The Petaluma paper printed the suit on the same page as the town's June war-bond sales and a farewell party for a local boy who had joined the Navy⁶. The outcome of the suit is not reported. The claim does show that someone was still caring for the greens that summer and was willing to go to court to protect them.

Three weeks later the Herald ran four lines between a Legion notice and a family's camping holiday. On Tuesday 21 July 1942 the Women's Golf Team of Sleepy Hollow had met for its weekly tournament, and Mrs. Charles Meyers and Mrs. Aurel Schneider had won first and second low net⁹². It is the last report we have found of anyone playing golf at Sleepy Hollow.

The map makers of 1942 put the course on their sheet just as it was ending. The clubhouse stayed open for another year, and that August Walter Lake began advertising drinking, dining and dancing at Sleepy Hollow^93,94. But no more golf was reported. By May 1943 the fairways where Art Bell had played the back nine in 31 were under the plough⁹⁵.

Dinner and Dancing, Without the Golf

The last women's Tuesday tournament at Sleepy Hollow was reported in the San Anselmo Herald on 23 July 1942. After that the sports pages go quiet¹. The clubhouse did not. Three weeks later Walter Lake took a small advertisement in the Herald inviting Marin to drink, dine and dance with him at Sleepy Hollow, telephone San Anselmo 2999². By late September it read Sleepy Hollow Country Club, Walter Lake, Manager, the title the Herald had given him since 1940^3,4. Whatever became of the fairways that autumn, the papers record no more golf; the old Hotaling mansion now earned its keep as a place to dine and dance.

It also stayed a meeting place. As late as the last week of April 1943 the Marin Business and Professional Women's Club held its installation dinner at the Sleepy Hollow Clubhouse⁵. By then the ground under the building had been sold.

The Week the Valley Was Sold

The golf company had never owned the valley. By the spring of 1943 the great tract around the course, which had once been the Hotaling ranch, was owned by the West Coast Life Insurance Company. George V. Kaenel's Sleepy Hollow Investment Company held an option to buy it, with the power to resell, and the option ran out on 30 April 1943⁶. Kaenel had been one of the founders of the Sleepy Hollow Golf Club⁷. What happened next is known in unusual detail because it ended in court.

According to the appeals court's opinion, Kaenel's directors met on 3 April. One offer before them came from a pair of dairymen, Sam and Zekie Smith, who wanted about 1,100 acres at $36 an acre. The board gave Kaenel 48 hours to sell 500 acres to A. J. Raisch, and agreed to take the Smiths' offer if the Raisch deal fell through⁶. The deadline passed without a sale. On 5 April the company's attorney offered the Smiths 1,085 acres of ranch surrounding the golf course, plus 15 acres off the top of the strip above the driving range, for $39,000 net. The offer kept the course itself back. It reserved spring water piped to the Club House, along with the dam that stored it, and it barred any ranch road past the clubhouse, because that ground was to be sold for homes. The next day the Smiths came back with changes and a $1,000 check, and the attorney signed a qualified acceptance, warning that he would need specific authority for the changes. Kaenel met Sam Smith on the street and congratulated him. On 8 April the board rejected the counteroffer and sold to other buyers. The Smiths sued. They lost, and in June 1944 the District Court of Appeal affirmed the judgment^6,8.

The other buyers were Al G. Raisch, a paving contractor (the 1943 reports and the court print his initials as A. J., which were his father's), and William Lang. On 15 April 1943 the Herald reported that 1,154 acres of the historic Hotaling property had been sold early that week for $67,500⁹. Raisch took the mansion and several hundred acres of hill and valley for $50,000. He planned to remodel the house for his family and add a lake, and the Argus-Courier said he would carry out some of the late Richard Hotaling's original dreams. Lang planned to cut his share into tracts of half an acre to ten acres^10,9. Two exceptions mattered. The first was the roughly 100 acres of the golf course, which Kaenel said would be divided into homesites. The second was eight acres at the old ranch house and barns, where the army had installed an ordnance unit^9,10,11. In telling the story, the Petaluma Argus-Courier recalled the Herzog dairy, the crash-killed hotel scheme and "Polly" Willard's public course, which it called one of the finest in the north bay¹⁰.

W. G. Weaver ran his answer on the same front page, under the title Save the Golf Course! He argued that the county or the town of San Anselmo should buy about thirty acres, at around $1,000 an acre, and keep nine holes. He worked out that the purchase would cost the owner of an average home about $1.50 in taxes for a single year. He reminded readers that most of the men who had played Sleepy Hollow were now away fighting, and he asked who would lead off⁹.

Spuds, Soldiers and Lots

Nobody did. Four weeks later Weaver used his Sub Rosa column to report the result.

"So They Plowed up the Old Golf Course."

That was the title of the sad ballad he proposed, and he said it described exactly what had happened to the Sleepy Hollow fairways. The greens had cost a thousand dollars apiece. Potatoes and corn were to replace them. Not one public-spirited citizen had come to his office about the nine holes. He signed off with a wartime joke: perhaps the spuds would help America make a hole in one across the pond¹². So by mid-May 1943 the course was gone.

The army stayed on. In June 1943 a grass fire broke out east of Manor station, and the Herald reported that fifty soldiers from the camps at Sleepy Hollow and the old golf course came with government equipment to help fight it. The Herald did not say which golf course it meant¹³. That summer the soldiers of Sleepy Hollow beat the new Point Reyes–Nicasio baseball team 7 to 2¹⁴. In the autumn their softball nine, listed as the Sleepy Hollow Ord team, took a five-game series from Nicasio three games to two^15,16. Writing nine years later, the Independent-Journal said that part of the old riding-stable lot had become an ammunition depot, with barracks for the small detachment that guarded it¹⁷.

Walter Lake left on Saturday, 10 July 1943, after four years at Sleepy Hollow. Five days later he opened Rancho Nicasio, twelve acres with barbecue pits and picnic grounds, and thanked his patrons in a farewell advertisement^18,19. The players scattered too. That November the Mill Valley Record noted that William Higuera of Fairfax, a former Sleepy Hollow club champion, had been beaten in Mill Valley's John Forbes trophy tournament²⁰.

The surveyors moved in next. By 1944 J. C. Oglesby had mapped a portion of the old links as numbered house lots, still under the heading Sleepy Hollow Golf Course, Unit 2²¹. Lots on the assessor's unrecorded map of Sleepy Hollow Acres, the older subdivision at the lower end of the valley, were already on the county's tax rolls²². In February 1945 the owners there gave notice that they would petition to join the town of San Anselmo. Their boundary description ran along Fawn Drive and then followed the edge of the Sleepy Hollow golf course, bearing by bearing²³. In May the town council checked a petition of about fifteen names. The Herald explained that the area held upwards of 125 lots and close to 200 residents, centred on the "former greens 4, 5 and 6 of the Sleepy Hollow golf course."²⁴ The petition was soon withdrawn so that more signatures could be gathered²⁵. The excerpts we have do not say how the annexation ended.

The course land itself changed hands at the end of May 1945. The first owners had reorganized the Sleepy Hollow Investment Company, and it sold 87 acres of the former 18-hole course for $91,000. The buyers were Kaenel himself and Frank Healion, both San Rafael realtors, together with David Adams, a San Anselmo builder. On 7 June the Herald reported that they had sold thirty homesites in a week, five of them to doctors. Lots had to have at least 100 feet of frontage and 15,000 square feet, so that nobody would build right up against a neighbour²⁵. (The 1943 stories had put the course at 100 acres. The 1945 figure of 87 acres is probably the more careful one.)

The new streets took their names from the valley's literary namesake. Oglesby's April 1946 map of Sleepy Hollow Unit Two shows Van Tassel, Van Winkle and Van Ripper running off Butterfield Road²⁶. In August the water district laid 575 feet of four-inch cast-iron pipe on Fawn Drive in the Sleepy Hollow Tract, and the subdividers advanced the money for most of it²⁷. A USGS survey plane photographed the valley on 22 July 1946. On that frame the outlines of the old fairways can perhaps still be traced among the new lots²⁸. In 1952 Sleepy Hollow School opened on Tarry Road, another Irving name²⁹. The tax collectors kept their own memory of the course. As late as 1953 the county's lists described a parcel bounded by the Golf Tract subdivision, and through 1956 they described a road strip beginning at the southeast end of the course^30,31.

The Big House on the Hill

At the head of the valley, Raisch and his wife, Katherine, moved into the Hotaling mansion. They gave it a coat of paint, modern plumbing, a swimming pool, an artificial lake and a dancing pavilion³². The house was a party house again. On a Sunday at the start of September 1945, the employees and business associates of the Raisch paving company held their annual barbecue in the grove behind the house. P. S. Harless, Raisch's partner in the 1943 purchase, served as official greeter and counted about 480 guests^33,25. In May 1948 some 3,000 Shriners paraded through San Rafael and then drove out to Al Raisch's Sleepy Hollow Ranch for an outdoor ceremonial and barbecue³⁴. In August 1949 Raisch, in colourful costume, served as ringmaster at the junior horse show at Don McNab's Sleepy Hollow Stables, which drew more than 2,500 spectators³⁵. A family wedding was held at the ranch that June³⁶, and in 1954 the Raisches lent it for a Humane Society barbecue with square dancing³⁷.

That 1952 article, by Helen Selinger in the Independent-Journal's Marin Magazine, was the first full retrospective of the valley. Some of what later writers repeat starts here. The syndicate with its hotel, mile-long lake and two golf courses had already appeared in the Argus-Courier's 1943 story¹⁰, but the 1952 article is the first to make it a Chicago syndicate. It also says that Willard and Kaenel took the land in 1935, and it names the 1943 buyers as Walter Lang and Albert G. Raisch, misspelled Raish. Readers also remembered roller-skating around the clubhouse's wide cement porch, and weekends of dining and dancing at the end of the long tree-shaded lane¹⁷. The contemporary papers spoke of eastern capital rather than Chicago, and they give William Lang.

Early on Sunday, 17 February 1957, the mansion burned. The Associated Press put it in a single line: fire had destroyed the 18-room Hotaling mansion of the old Sleepy Hollow Ranch⁴⁰. Fuller wire accounts added that the house was empty. Fire Chief Nello Marcucci thought the fire had been set deliberately, probably by youngsters who used the place as a hideout. The owners were developers who had planned to tear the house down that spring and subdivide the 500-acre ranch^41,42. In its own report the Oakland Tribune went back to the 1,600-acre estate and the family quarrel that had ended in a four-way division, with Sleepy Hollow going to Mrs. Hotaling⁴³.

The Sisters and the Steps

For a few years the hilltop lay open. In June 1964 the Mill Valley Record's guide to family outings listed the Dominican property at Sleepy Hollow. It suggested driving to the end of Butterfield Road and walking up past the burned-down mansion to a drained lake-bed in the upper valley⁴⁴. That was probably Raisch's lake, though the guide does not say so. (A 1958 fight over a small dam built by Justice Jesse W. Carter in Sleepy Hollow may concern the same water, but the reports do not place it^45,46.)

The Dominican Sisters built their new school there. Their convent school had been founded in Monterey in 1850 and had moved to San Rafael. On a rainy Saturday in December 1965 it moved again, with a Century Plus Parade that ran from the old campus to Sleepy Hollow. A six-horse carriage led the way, followed by vintage cars full of costumed students carrying luggage. A band greeted the parade on arrival, and the house was blessed later that day. The school would now be called San Domenico School for Girls^47,48. The Sleepy Hollow Homes Association gives its formal dedication as 30 April 1966⁴⁹. By that autumn the alumnae were lunching on the new campus, and drama students were performing in an outdoor theatre on Butterfield Road^50,51. In 1967 an assembly building went out to bid⁵².

Very little of the golf course survives. At San Domenico's entrance, the stone steps that once climbed to Richard Hotaling's veranda still stand with fragments of the foundation. They are the steps that appear in photographs of the clubhouse in the 1930s, and today they lead nowhere³⁹. Below them Butterfield Road still follows the creek down the valley. The neighbourhood's streets carry the Irving names the subdividers chose, and Fawn Drive runs through the area that the Herald in 1945 described as centred on the old fourth, fifth and sixth greens^24,23.

The story most often told today is that the course closed in 1939 for lack of water. That is how the Homes Association's history puts it⁴⁹. The papers tell a fuller story. Water was a real worry: in 1937 a stockholders' suit said the course was behind on its water bills and the district was threatening to cut service⁵³. But the course survived it. It held the Northern California PGA championship in 1940, its women played their Tuesday tournaments into July 1942, and Weaver was still trying to save nine holes of it in April 1943⁵⁴. It ended because of war and real estate: the players went into uniform, the land was sold, and the fairways went under the plow^1,9,12.

That is also how the golf writers remembered it. In 1949 a Marin pro looking for land for a new public course noted that the county once had two more courses, at San Rafael and at Sleepy Hollow, and that both had been subdivided for homes⁵⁵. In September 1957 a sports columnist in Healdsburg surveyed golf's comeback across the Redwood Empire. He listed the new courses that were open or being built, Indian Valley in Marin among them. Then he listed the ones that had been lost. The old Marin Golf and Country Club, Belvedere, Fort Baker and the Sleepy Hollow Golf Club had all been "victims of the depression of the thirties and later construction expansion."⁵⁶ The verdict was fair. Sleepy Hollow was a Depression course, built in a valley that had already beaten several grander schemes. It lasted only six seasons as an 18-hole links, from April 1937 to the summer of 1942, before the houses arrived, and those houses are what make up the neighbourhood today.