“In 1935, the National Park Service recommended an 83-square mile park, but there was no action until 1958. By this time, subdivisions were again being planned, logging was underway at Inverness Ridge, and the state was planning a freeway that would replace Highway 1 and open the area to suburban development. One lobbyist told a Congressional committee that by the year 2000
‘there will no longer be a Marin County. There will be a greater San Francisco..…the section we have under discussion today, gentlemen, will be as intensely built over as Palo Alto, or Burlingame or San Mateo.’
The MCL [Marin Conservation League] worked with Marin’s representative in Congress Clem Miller, who introduced and tirelessly promoted his Point Reyes National Seashore bill in the House, while California’s US Senator Clair Engle, pushed it through in the Senate…..In a compromise with ranchers, the park bill allowed cattle and dairy ranching to continue for 25 years in a 27-square mile “pastoral zone,” while livestock grazing elsewhere would be phased out. Congress passed the bill, and President Kennedy signed it on September 13, 1962. The park was authorized to include 83 square miles, just as the Park Service had originally recommended…..”
Excerpt from David D. Schmidt’s San Francisco Bay Area: An Environmental History (Humboldt County, CA: Backcountry Press, 2025) pps. 396-398.
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