Earlier this year, Dewey Livingston invited me to write about Inverness’s early shingle houses and the people who built them. It was a welcome, if surprising, invitation. I have no architectural training, and though my wife, Sarah, and I have been visiting Sarah’s uncle, Steve Aikenhead, in West Marin for 30 years, we only last year purchased a home here. Nonetheless, I have a certain passion for the project that may help compensate for my shortcomings.
I see Inverness as an “imagined village.” Remove the vehicles and utility poles (Inverness did not get electricity until 1927), and sections of town today would be recognizable to people who lived here 100 years ago. After Inverness was subdivided in 1889, many of these people came for summers and built modest adaptations of the brown shingle houses once commonly seen in cities such as Berkeley.
Inverness still retains its early architectural character. In the words of architectural historian Daniella Thompson, its houses are the “least disturbed” of the Bay Area’s surviving brown shingle houses.
The writing project has a long way to go, but as I’ve researched, I’ve come across some interesting people with connections to Inverness of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It seems a shame not to share what I have learned.
Josephine Maria Hyde was an important figure in California art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and an Inverness resident. Her father, Isaac Hyde, was a banker who served as a director of the Savings and Loan Society of San Francisco, the first such society in California.
Both her parents came from the East Coast. Her mother, Elizabeth Josephine Smith, came with her parents from Boston by ship at age 14, then overland through the Panama Isthmus and by steamer to San Francisco. Isaac came from Connecticut, traveling on a 100-foot wooden schooner around Cape Horn, arriving in California in 1849. Isaac and Elizabeth married in 1861, and Josephine was the oldest of their five children.
In the 1880s, Josephine studied etching under Virgil Williams, co-founder of the San Francisco Art Association, at the School of Design. In 1887, she co-founded the Sketch Club, which exists today as the Society of San Francisco Women Artists. The Sketch Club was the first women’s art club in California, and was, at the time, a female alter ego to the all-male Bohemian Club, which Virgil Williams had co-founded in 1872. Josephine served alternately as president and secretary of the club, showed her art works at club exhibitions and performed in the club’s orchestra.
It was likely through the Sketch Club that Josephine met the famous artist Helen Hyde (no relation), possibly in 1894. Josephine and Helen travelled together to Japan to learn print and painting techniques in 1899, a time that coincided with the country’s ukiyo-e period of woodblock prints. They received private brush painting instruction from Kano Tomonobu, whom Josephine described in a 1900 article for the San Francisco Chronicle as the “old court painter.”
In later interviews, Helen cited Josephine’s influence in persuading her to try printmaking, a pursuit that would become the focus of Helen Hyde’s career.
When Josephine returned from Japan, she resumed her affiliation with the Sketch Club and was active in Bay Area society. It was through society events that she may have become acquainted with the Point Reyes area.
A 1906 article in the San Francisco Call cited Josephine and Emma Shafter Howard as prominent members of the newly formed Japan Society of America, of which David Starr Jordan, the founding president of Stanford University, was an officer, and President Theodore Roosevelt an honorary member. By 1906, Emma Shafter Howard was spending time in Inverness in a house she had built with her son Karl. Emma was a Zelig-like figure in early 20th-century Bay Area affairs. She was also a charter member of the Sierra Club (one of seven women out of the club’s original 182 members), and the honorary vice president of the Women’s Board for the 1915 Panama Pacific Exhibition.
The guest book of the Highland Lodge records one of Josephine’s early visits to Inverness in June 1908. Her house on Forres Way, built in 1909, was designed by the architect Ernest Coxhead, whose brother and sister-in-law were Josephine’s next-door neighbors. The title to the house was recorded in the names of Josephine’s sister and brother-in-law, possibly because she never married, and it was difficult for a single woman to hold real property in that era. (Women did not secure the right to vote in California until 1911.)
Josephine was active in St. Columba’s Episcopal Church and the Sir Francis Drake Association. Beginning around 1914, for one day each June, she donned a large straw hat with a floppy brim and headed out to Drakes Bay in an open touring car to celebrate mass with the rector of Oakland’s St. John’s Episcopal Church and other dignitaries and invitees.
An article promoting the 1916 event in the Marin Journal notified attendees to “carry their luncheon, and that to avoid any inconvenience it would be better to engage transportation from Pt. Reyes Station by letter written to the Sir Francis Drake Association.”
The group assembled each year for “Miss Hyde’s ‘Drakefest,’” as historian Jack Mason called it, and gazed down on Drakes Bay at a place they believed Drake had careened the Golden Hinde for several weeks in June 1579. Drake had carried a treasure plundered from Spanish outposts in the Americas that, on his return to England, made his Queen, Elizabeth I, very rich.
A photograph of the Drakefest circa 1915 shows Father Irving Spencer, the rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church who helped develop St. Columba’s (then located at 3 Cameron Street) during his summer vacations, at far left. To the right is William Ford Nichols, the second Episcopal bishop of California. Josephine, in her floppy straw hat, is seen to the right of Bishop Nichols. To the right of Josephine is Zelia Nuttall, a prominent Mexican American archaeologist who reshaped views about Aztec civilization and was a leading researcher on Sir Francis Drake at the time. And to the right of Zelia is the ubiquitous Emma Shafter Howard. The photograph was taken near Chimney Rock and the present-day Coast Guard house.
Josephine Hyde died in 1929 at her home in Oakland. In 1930, the Sir Francis Drake Association wrote to Lady Beatrice Seaton of Devon, England to inform her of Josephine’s passing. Lady Seaton, a descendent of Sir Francis Drake, responded to the letter by contributing five pounds sterling to the association for the construction of a monument in Drake’s honor.
Courtney Linn lives in Inverness and Sacramento, where he works as the general counsel for a credit union.