Marin history: How the Hutchinson Rock Quarry came to be

Longtime Marin residents will remember the scarred hillside and oddly shaped, leaning structure that once dominated what is now Larkspur Landing. The Hutchinson Rock Quarry blasted and excavated the ridge for nearly 50 years after expanding its operations from El Cerrito to the San Quentin peninsula in 1924.

Dwight Hutchinson and brother, Hardy, had been looking for an additional quarry location and asked Berkeley geology professor Andrew Lawson to find a site “with a lot of rock, near water for barging.” The professor recommended the San Quentin peninsula, which at the time was in unincorporated Greenbrae. The land was purchased from the Remillard brickyard family, whose distinctive red brick smokestack can be seen in the photo’s background, and is still in existence today.

Through the subsequent decades, Hutchinson Quarry crushed rock was used throughout the Bay Area on dikes in the Sacramento Delta, for railroad beds in Oakland, as ballast for the Oakland-Bay Bridge and for access roads to the Golden Gate Bridge and for many Marin County highways and roads.

The quarry also supplied huge, whole boulders that were used to shore up Treasure Island for the opening of the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition. The quarry used long conveyor belts that transported the finished rock down to the water’s edge, where it was loaded on to barges for transport.

In a 1989 interview, early Greenbrae resident Harry Richards recalled hearing the dynamite blasts from the quarry on a daily basis. “At 3:30 p.m. each day, there would be a whistle from the Hutchison Quarry at Greenbrae, followed by a series of thunderous blasts as they shot the holes that they had drilled that day,” he said.

By the late 1960s, local municipalities were vying for the Golden Gate Bridge District’s planned Central Marin Ferry Terminal. One of the proposed sites was the Hutchinson Quarry site. In 1971, after much public debate and numerous planning and council meetings in Larkspur, Greenbrae and San Rafael, the area was annexed to the town of Larkspur and the site for the Ferry Terminal was selected by the Golden Gate Bridge District Board.

As the ferry terminal project came to fruition, Larkspur also hired a developer to design a large shopping center, tennis complex and housing project that would eventually become Larkspur Landing. Not everyone, however, was pleased with the planned development. A February 1973 Daily Independent Journal article reported on an Elizabeth Terwilliger protest that included a large “flotilla of canoes” paddling up the wetlands to Corte Madera Creek in an attempt to preserve the wetlands.

Within a few years, more than 400 housing units had been built on the quarry site, along with the shopping center and ferry terminal.

Today, there are only a few remnants to recall days past and gone. Fans of Clint Eastwood will recall the final scene in “Dirty Harry” as he hangs onto the top of a bus that is being driven wildly past the old quarry site.

The Remillard brickworks smokestack is still there, and the small cottage just to the right of the huge screening and storage building in the photograph has survived and is now the home of the Children’s Cottage Cooperative childcare center on the corner of Lincoln Village Circle and Drake’s Way.

History Watch is written by Scott Fletcher, a volunteer at the Marin History Museum, marinhistory.org. Images included in History Watch are available for purchase by calling 415-382-1182 or by email at info@marinhistory.org