Marin County residents may be familiar with the San Rafael Airport which lies between the two forks of Las Gallinas creek near the McInnis Park golf complex in Terra Linda. However, the original airport, named The Santa Venetia Airport, was built along N. San Pedro Rd. on Smith Ranch land. In a 2013 Anne T. Kent, California Room oral history, descendent Ed Smith said the family jokingly referred to it as “the Smith Family International Airport.” The site is now covered with homes near the present-day intersection of Adrian Way and La Posada Way. That airport dates back to the late 1920s appearing in newspaper articles of the era. The photograph above dates from the early 1930s and N. San Pedro Rd. can be seen in the background up against the wooded hillside that has not changed much in the ensuing years. At that point, it had been renamed the San Rafael Airport.
By the late 1930’s the name was changed to the Marin County Airport and a much larger hangar was built and the runway lengthened to 2400 ft. Most news coming out of the airport from the decade of the 1930s centered around local women who were earning their flying licenses or using the airport’s runways for landings and take-offs. These stories were newsworthy as aviation at the time was still predominately a male occupation. Women who flew against tradition were 68-year-old grandmother, Rosa Rutz, Mary Sellmer, wife of Walter Sellmer the Marin County Sheriff and Game Warden, and the much-celebrated Barbara Towne from Santa Rosa who became the first woman to earn both commercial and transport flying licenses in California.
With the onset of World War II, the Marin County Airport fell on hard times and by the mid 1940s had ceased operations. After the war, the airport was moved closer to the railway line further west running along Highway 101. It was renamed The Smith Ranch Airport and when sold later; the Marin Ranch Airport. In the early and mid 1950s the entire northern San Rafael area was being developed for housing and the original airport site disappeared under the bulldozers. The Marin Ranch Airport land was also sold and became the site for the building of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Marin County Civic Center. In the early 1970s, the present-day San Rafael Airport was built on land between the two forks of Las Gallinas Creek off Smith Ranch Rd., just a stone’s throw from the original airport site.
Thank you to Bob Herbst of the San Rafael Airport for helping to untangle timelines and the changing names of the airfields.
(Originally appeared as History Watch article in the Marin Independent Journal)