San Anselmo was a popular tourist destination in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Visitors and residents alike were drawn to the waters of San Anselmo Creek where children frolicked and explored its banks and anglers cast their lines for trout. “The old swimming hole,” made by damming the creek between Lansdale and Yolanda, drew crowds of children and adults during the summer months.
The dam in the creek seems to have been created yearly whether sanctioned or not by the Town. In June 1915, Lansdale residents were granted permission by town trustees to build a dam. Just one month later, the trustees received complaints that the pool was “becoming troublesome” with “half grown boys and girls using the pond indiscriminately. Bad language was indulged in and the place was unsanitary.” The water was tested and was found to be sanitary, but by August a more serious problem was reported – nudity.
The San Rafael Independent reported on complaints received about men, women and children changing their clothes on the creek banks in open view. One woman would not let her husband use their back porch because “the horrible human, living pictures in the nude has a tendency to effect his heart.”
The Sacramento Bee picked up the following story from San Anselmo on August 6th:
“Emulating September Morn* and apparently caring not for the consequences, a shapely female resident of the Lansdale section has turned all San Anselmo, official and unofficial, topsy-turvy during the past week by appearing in and about the town swimming hole in the nude. Each morning for the past five days the mermaid has suddenly appeared at the swimming hole apparently from nowhere, stripped, bathed and disappeared without her identity being disclosed.
Last week early risers hurrying to catch a San Francisco-bound train were shocked beyond measure to observe the fair bather quite devoid of clothing splashing in the cool clear pool. The next day a somewhat larger crowd witnessed the performance from behind hedges trees and around the corners of houses.
Then the trouble started. Marshal Eastman was appealed to. The Marshal came saw and—fled. The sanitary commissioners were appealed to. They, like the Marshal, refused to act. The women of the district held a caucus. They sought to arrest the bather, but could not ascertain her identity, nor could they find an officer so brave as to take her into custody on a Jane Doe warrant while swimming.
At last Mayor Atthowe and the Trustees were asked to abate the “nuisance.” They did. The pool was caused by a dam in San Anselmo Creek. The Trustees removed the dam and sent the pool rushing onward to the sea.”
The swimming hole seems to have been created each summer well into the 1920s without further reports of indecency or rowdiness, but sanitation remained a concern.
In 1916, the older boys at the Presbyterian Orphanage hand dug a 20 x 40 foot swimming tank which local children could use for a small fee. Dreams of a public swimming pool in Memorial Park were quashed by repeated bond issue failures. It wasn’t until the summer of 1952, when the Sir Francis Drake High School pool opened, that San Anselmo had what could be called a community pool.
*September Morn is a reference to the controversial painting of a nude young woman standing in shallow waters, “September Morn,” by French artist Paul Emile Chabas first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1912 and to the silent comedy film of the same name released in 1914.