I met a guy who was born at the naval base in Tiburon (aka net depot) sometime around 1940, he said his birth certificate lists Belvedere because that is where they got their mail.
Thanks for all the info Paul. What rang the biggest bell was Lakeville, Ca.
My old maps show all kinds of towns that I didn't think were there. And some still make it onto GPS devices which is really dumb.
Like my map with Detour as a town, and Waldo, a town by The Buckeye Restaurant. Makes sense knowing that Waldo was just a train stop since we know Detour was.
My maps show a bunch between Richmond and Pittsburg on the train route which I thought were all company towns and I'm sure most were but now I realize they're on the map because they were train stops.
Oh, and how could I forget the metropolis of Almonte and Jody's Junction there at the end of Miller Ave in Mill Valley which is on a lot of maps.
Whoops. One of these days, I'll stop replying to this message.
If it's the term "Star Route" you're asking about, that's a generic designation for a contract postal route. In other words, the work is what we would today call "outsourced," although the practice goes way back into the mists of time. The name came about because there was an asterisk (*) appended to such routes in lists.
They could be routes that merely transported mail between postal facilities, or routes that actually delivered mail. What the present-day deal is with Muir Beach, I don't know. The "star route" designation may just be a holdover from the olden days whose irrelevance doesn't matter because there's probably only one guy* who delivers all the mail there.
"Muir Beach" is, I assume, a genuine place name, not a postally-concocted one. _____________________ * see disclaimers in previous post.
Oh, yeah. There used to be a separate Tiburon Post Office, up until the 1960s, I think. Administratively, the combined operation was, and still is, called the "Belvedere-Tiburon Post Office." There was never any requirement, not to mention any practical reason, for using that as the "city" part of the mailing address.
Mail gets delivered by post offices, not by political subdivisions (i.e. cities and towns). Therefore, mail destined for a particular delivery point (e.g. a mail box someplace) first has to go to the post office that accomplishes that delivery, 'cause that's where the mailman* is.
Now, if the name of the town and the name of the post office congrue, groovy. In fact, that's how it mostly is. But now tell me: what city is the Cheese Factory in? Answer: it ain't. Now, in the olden days when mail was transported via trains, post offices that weren't in cities or towns were generally named for the train stops. Hence, up until the 1920s, there was a post office named "Lakeville" somewhere in the Lakeville Highway area southeast of Petaluma. If your mail was delivered through that P.O., you had your mail addressed to Lakeville, California. After it was folded into Petaluma, you had your mail addressed to "Petaluma, California." There are today Petaluma delivery addresses way out on Hwy 37, far beyond the city limits of the eponymous metropolitan unit.
Finding out why an area out in the boonies got attached to one P.O. rather than another would be a good exercise in historical research. Since matters postal were subject to political determination pre-1970, it may have been due to which congersmin had more clout than another, or which party was in power. Or it could have been just plain old practicality - that did happen, despite present-day historical revisionism.
Anyway, the bottom line (which, if you think about it, is literally what we're talking about) is that the purpose of the "city" part of an address on a piece of mail is not to relate the address to any particular location, but only to the postal facility that delivers the mail.
Of course, this was critical in the old railroad-transportation, everything done by hand days. Now just use the right ZIP Code and you could have your mail addressed to Potrzebie, CA and an electronic brain would not only route your letter to the correct P.O., but directly to the mailman** who delivers it and arrange it and all the other mail in the order he*** travels. _________________________________________________ * term is used in the traditional sense; no gender stereotyping expressed or implied. ** likewise *** mm-hmm
I was just at the Marin French Cheese Co. which is in Marin on the map but the clerk claimed it's in Petaluma.
I noticed three rural schools on the map in Marin that also used Petaluma. Just because Petaluma delivers their mail, I find it odd to call it Petaluma. Anyone know how this started way back when ?
I was in Muir Beach and the address was Star Route, Sausalito Why , Where did that name come from, and is it just Muir ?
In the old days Tiburon-Belvedere (or was it Belvedere-Tiburon) was the address for everything out there. And again, just because they share a post office IMO is no reason to lump them together.
