The Countess And The Brickyard
By DOROTHY GARDINER
A tiny woman who played a key role in Marin's industrial past may have well done the same thing for the county's future.
From the time of the Gold Rush timbers, brick and supplies needed to transform a sleepy village into the burgeoning city of San Francisco were barged across the Bay from Marin County.
Structures such as the old chocolate factory at Ghiradelli Square, the Cannery, the two Palace hotels (before and after the 1906 earthquake and fire), the St. Francis and Clift hotels, were built with brick sent by boat to San Francisco from the Remillard Brick Co.'s Marin yards. [Remillard Brothers on wikipedia]
One who remembers it well is Countess Lillian Remillard Dandini, 93-year-old daughter of the brick company's founder, Pierre Remillard. It was she, in 1915 as company vice-president, who shut down the last local yard on a site close to where the Golden Gate Bridge District's ferry terminal is scheduled to open in Larkspur next June.
IN THE EARLY 1930s she said she sold a large acreage of the land to the late Forrest E. Brown, owner of Brown-Ely Co. and the Hutchinson Quarry on the site. (The tilted quarry building east of Highway 101 has long been a curiosity to passing motorists.) [Buys McNear Property For Marin Factory]
Two years ago Robert H. Lee Associates began negotiating for the purchase of the old Remillard Kiln (pronounced "Kill," according to Lee, a Larkspur city councilman.)
Lee and his associates plan to restore the kiln in much the same way San Francisco's Cannery and Ghiradelli Square have been salvaged and reopen it as a restaurant and museum.
Later T. I. Properties purchased the Hutchinson Co.'s quarry and remaining Remillard lands. According to spokesman John J. Ford III of San Francisco, a study for suitable development of the 105 acre site is now under way.
During a May visit with the Countess at her 96-room chateau built in 1915 in Hillsborough by the Pullman heiress Harriet Carolan, the slight and fragile-looking woman who was friend of both Jack London and Enrico Caruso spoke of her life, family and Marin holdings over a bottle of chilled California champagne and pink and white birthday cake baked by a young admirer.
(At the time of this interview the Countess had been celebrating her birthday with a two-week round of parties staying up until 2 or 3 in the morning dancing. A week later she broke her hip in a fall at the chateau and has since been recuperating in a San Mateo hospital.)
ACCORDING TO Lillian Dandini the Remillard story in California began 26 years before her own birth in 1880 in Oakland.
Young men around the world were still dreaming of fortunes to be found in California's gold fields when 17-year-old Pierre Remillard and his brother Hilaire, 18, decided to leave the family farm near Montreal to head for the mines.
They arrived in San Francisco in 1854 after crossing the Isthmus of Panama and immediately caught a stage to Nevada City where they mined for the next five years.
A year after the arrival of another brother Edward, in 1860, the Remillards separated, with Pierre returning to San Francisco and the brothers going to Oregon.
TWO FRENCHMEN operating a brickyard on the banks of Oakland's Lake Merritt hired the 23-year-old French-speaking Pierre. Within a month "he was boss" and two months later "a partner," his daughter smiled.
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LOOKING LIKE a relic from Civil War days, the historic Remillard Brick
Co.'s kiln in Larkspur has been proven as impregnable as any a fort.
Built some 30 years following the war between the states, it was for 24
years, up until 1915, one of the Bay Area's most productive kilns,
turning out a minimum of 500,000 bricks a year. San Francisco landmarks,
such as the chocolate factory at Ghirardelli Square, the Cannery and the
second Palace Hotel, were built from brick fired within its walls. (Independent-Journal photo) |
When the Frenchmen returned to Europe in 1865, their interest in the firm was taken over by Hilaire and Edward Remillard.
While the firm grew into a mammoth corporation owning Oakland's first building supply yard and brickyards in Marin, Pleasanton and San Jose, Pierre Remillard, as major stockholder, always remained in control.
When he was 28 he married Cordule Laurin, a young girl whom he had met once two years before in Lafayette and had "never been able to forget," their daughter related.
THE COUNTESS' mother had come with her family from Canada to the gold fields near Sacramento when she was 12. Later her father became a storekeeper on the same street in Sacramento where Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford and Charles Crocker were selling drygoods and sundries before becoming the "Big Four" of Central Pacific Railroad fame.
Pierre and Cordule settled down to married life in an Oakland mansion where their first child, Philip H. Remillard, was born the next year.
The firm bought 75 acres along the Gallinas Creek for a Marin brickyard in the
1870s near today's Civic Center and Santa Venetia. Brick used for the first
Palace Hotel was fired at this yard.
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| The 1892 Official Map Of Marin County, California map, georeferenced, showing the location of the P. N. Remillard parcel and modern-day Buck's Landing |
REMILLARD BRICK was shipped down the San Pablo Bay in a fleet of schooners named for the Remillard women. When the Countess was 5, in 1885, her father named a new schooner Lillian in her honor.
"It was always on the rocks and in the newspapers," she laughed, "and the family had the greatest time with her."
The Santa Venetia yard, managed by a younger Remillard brother Frank who had arrived with the entire clan in 1869, closed down after his drowning on a trip to Oregon.
A few years later, in 1889, the firm bought 150 acres of the "old Porter Ranch" in Greenbrae, the Countess said. In those days the land occupied by the quarry and abandoned kiln was called Greenbrae. Today it is within Larkspur's boundaries and lies adjacent to the less than 40-year old development called Greenbrae.
CLAY FROM the flatlands lying between San Quentin Prison and today's Highway 101 and "up in the hills" was fired inside a Hoffman kiln into a minimum of 500,000 bricks a year.
It was used to rebuild San Francisco after the 1906 disaster and in those days when young Lillian Remillard was already company vice-president, 400 workmen "mostly Italians" were employed throughout the Bay Area.
Lillian Remillard grew up the youngest of three children in the family's Oakland home.
During her years at Oakland High School she helped Jack London through a French course and continued the study of music and voice which she started at 12.
AFTER GRADUATION she went to New York to study at a conservatory on 12th Street and was encouraged to embark upon a professional career by friends, such as Caruso, from the Metropolitan Opera Co.
When her family objected she gave up the idea of an operatic career but has remained active in musical circles throughout her life. In the 1920s she was an organizer of the San Francisco Opera Co. and is past president of the Pacific Opera Co.
Deaths of her brother and father, "last of the Remillard men," in the early 1900s undoubtedly changed the course of Lillian Remillard's life.
Philip Remillard, who had built Oakland's first golf links and introduced a game called football to San Francisco, according to his sister, was only 33 when he died in 1901.
THREE YEARS later Pierre Remillard died at age 67 leaving control of his vast empire to his widow who became corporation president and his youngest daughter Lillian, named vice-president at 24. (She became president of the Remillard Brick Co. in 1934 following her mother's death.)
Mother and daughter managed the changeover from steam to electricity and from horses to trucks and succeeded in buying Oakland waterfront property Pierre had been unable to purchase.
"We paid $20,000 and later resold it to Mayor Mott for $60,000," the countess chuckled. [Add a zero, they sold it for $650,000 in 1910.]
Along with Lillian's older sister Emma, the women traveled extensively spending a "few summers" at the old Hotel Rafael in San Rafael before it was destroyed in a 1928 fire.
THEY WERE IN New York when news of the 1906 earthquake was telegraphed around the world. Immediately leaving for the stricken city they undoubtedly crossed paths with the terrified Caruso who had been appearing in San Francisco at the time of the disaster and fled vowing never to return.
After a stay in Southern California they moved into the Fairmont Hotel where they maintained a suite until Lillian located a "dream house" with a window in back of a stairway and view on San Francisco's Vallejo Street.
There at age 52 she married Count Allessandro Dandini, an Italian nobleman 20 years her junior.
IN THE EARLY 1940s the Dandini name was splashed across Bay Area newspaper front pages when the count was jailed for a year and a half on an income tax evasion conviction and his wife sued for separate maintenance in California.
The count's subsequent Nevada divorce and remarriage there and the Countess's successful suit to have that marriage declared illegal in California again dominated the headlines.
She again became the center of big story in 1950 when she rescued the world-famous Carolands from destruction.
Read more at Knave - Oakland Countess Made the Bricks That Built Her Chateau Carolands - Oakland Tribune, Nov 5, 1967
The estate was then in the hands of developer W. C. Thompson who planned on subdividing the grounds into a residential tract. His announced intentions to demolish the 96-room mansion on which Willis Polk had worked brought cries of protest from around the Bay Area but not the money to save the building.
THOMPSON "NEEDED gravel for his roads" (the miles of streets throughout the subdivision), the countess explained. She supplied the rock from her San Jose brickyard, made a financial agreement with Thompson and became the new owner of the four-story Napoleanic chateau that ironically had been built with brick from her firm's San Jose yard.
Here her sister Emma died at age 86 in 1956.
Over the years the Countess has continued to open the buff-colored chateau for countless benefits and parties and usually attends and enjoys the festivities.
ALTHOUGH AN absentee Marin landlord, Lillian Dandini has left an indelible mark on the history of Marin and possibly its future.
A development team that includes T. I. Properties, Lincoln Properties of Palo Alto (in charge of residential development) and Newman Properties of Santa Monica (commercial development) has hired Bay Area architect John Carl Warnecke to draw preliminary plans and working drawings for the development.
Warnecke who designed Marin City buildings more than a decade ago also drew plans for the Kennedy gravesites and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
DURING A VISIT to his antique-filled law offices in the Golden Gateway overlooking San Francisco Bay, attorney John J. Ford III, a T. I. Properties spokesman, pointed to the architect's preliminary sketches that include a luxury hotel for the quarry land and a nearby cluster of small specialty shops. (These drawings are reproduced on the facing page.)
A large model of the plans was at the time enroute from Southern California where it had been displayed at an international convention and where it had drawn rave reviews from planners across the country, according to Ford.
Plans call for the shops to line brick courtyards and to be covered by archways constructed from "weathered and beaten 16-by-34s" to be salvaged from the old quarry buildings.
THE TEAM IS working to preserve relics from the site and capture the feeling of early Marin, and researchers have been hired to do a market survey to determine what Marin needs and wants in the way of housing for the residential section, according to Ford.
The land is expected to be cleared by next June to coincide with opening of the Larkspur ferry terminal with construction in the commercial section to get underway later in the year.
It is possible that where once Remillard schooners bearing brick plied the
waters between Marin and San Francisco, ferries soon may bring passengers to
stay at an elegant resort hotel overlooking the historic kiln.
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