The area around San Rafael - San Anselmo, the Ross Valley, Corte Madera, and north into the rolling hills around Lucas Valley and Terra Linda - has followed a long trail from the times of the Coast Miwok to the development of the small cities that now line Highway 101.

The county was named for an Indian and the county seat for a Spanish mission; it has embraced a sort of small-town boosterism and a strict policy that limits growth.

Central Marin's lifeline has gone from small trading boats to electric trains and back again. It has everything from poverty in San Rafael's canal district to great wealth. It is a region of both old settlers and newcomers. In a way, it is California in microcosm.

It began, as most California stories do, with Indian people, in this case Coast Miwok, who lived in small villages from what the later Americans called the Golden Gate to Pomo territory in Sonoma County.

"If modern Californians could be transported back ... the first thing they would notice would be the stillness," Betty Goerke wrote in "Chief Marin," her biography of the man who gave his name to the county.

Marin - his original name was Huicmuse - was born in what is now called Sausalito about 1780, was baptized by the Spanish missionaries at Mission San Francisco de Asis when he was 20. He took the name of Marino. Sometimes he was called Marinero, or sailor, because he was an expert in sailing small vessels in the tricky currents of San Francisco Bay.

Gen. Mariano Vallejo suggested his name - shortened to "Marin" - when the county north of San Francisco was formed in 1850.

The Spanish had contact with Marino's people early in the 19th century, and in December 1817, more than 200 Indians, five Spanish soldiers and two priests crossed the bay to found a new mission on a small tidal creek near a hill with a freshwater spring nearby.

The Miwok called this place Nanaguani. The Spanish called it San Rafael, after the archangel who is the patron of healing.

It was the climate that drew the attention of the padres in San Francisco. Unlike San Francisco, San Rafael was warm; the summer fogs that bedeviled the San Francisco mission seldom came to this part of the world.

The new mission prospered for a time, yet it contained within it the seeds of its own destruction. The cultural impact of Spanish and later Mexican colonization of California and European diseases devastated the Miwok. By the mid-1820s there were more than 1,000 Indians living at Mission San Rafael; by the first census of the American era in 1852, there were only 218 in the whole county.

The mission was secularized and in 1837, Timothy Murphy, an Irishman who became a naturalized Mexican citizen, became administrator of the mission lands. Murphy - or Don Timeteo, as he liked to be called - built the first two-story house in San Rafael.

The hold of the Spanish and later the Mexican government on California was weak, and by 1846, the Americans had come to stay.

Marin grew slowly under the American flag. Most of the commerce at the time followed the small creeks that lead into San Francisco Bay. In addition to San Rafael Creek, Corte Madera Creek was navigable as far as Ross Landing, which became an important small port for shipping hay, produce and other freight to San Francisco.

Marin was a self-sufficient small county, but starting as early as the 1860s, it began slowly to change. By the 1860s, there was regular steamer service to San Francisco, making it possible to work in the city and live in the gentler climate of Marin.

By the 1870s, a rail line was built from Sausalito out through the Ross Valley to West Marin and to the redwood country of Sonoma County. For a while, the town of Tomales, in western Marin, threatened to overtake San Rafael as the main town of the county. But by the 1880s, San Rafael got a main line railroad of its own.

For many years, the county's main industry was agriculture. Central Marin, especially Lucas Valley and what is now Terra Linda, was dairy country, and the Marin Dell and Lucas Valley milk brands were especially prized.

But two things - the modernization of Marin's railroads and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake - changed things again.

Marin's old-fashioned steam railroads were converted to fast electric train operation in 1903 and 1904, making a commute to work in San Francisco quick and easy. Trains ran from Fairfax and San Rafael to Sausalito, where they connected with ferries headed for the city. It was possible to commute in an hour: to work in the city and live in the country.

The 1906 earthquake wrecked much of San Francisco. Many city people moved to Marin and never looked back.

The 1920s were a boom time in Marin. The Northwestern Pacific Railroad was modernized again with new cars and new stations, and booster organizations, like Marvelous Marin Inc., praised the virtues of the county to the skies. To old residents, it was a golden era, and places like the famous Rose Bowl in Larkspur, where summer dances under the stars were part of a way of life, are still fondly remembered.

The country was still in the depths of the Great Depression when the Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937. Marin was still a small place, but when the war came in 1941, it had a huge effect.

"The war changed everything," said Roy Farrington Jones, who is 87 and one of the county's genuine old-timers. His family has lived in Marin since 1853. A wartime shipyard opened at Marinship in Sausalito. Hamilton Field near Novato became an important base. More than 1 million military personnel passed through the Bay Area.

They liked what they saw. "They liked the climate, they liked the Bay Area, and they decided that after the war they'd come back and stay," said Jones.

"Though the bridge opened in 1937, the county didn't really take off until 10 years later," said Dewey Livingston, a Marin historian.

"There were articles in Sunset magazine and in the East about Marin," he said. "It became a very desirable place. After the war, people wanted to move to California and live the good life."

And no place was more California than Marin County: water on three sides, mountains and open country, redwoods, oak trees, a golden climate.

They filled in the marshes in Corte Madera, covered the hills of the Tiburon Peninsula with houses, turned the cow pastures into subdivisions. "Too many people," said Jones, who prefers the older, quieter Marin.

At the same time, the growth of a new Marin produced a kind of counter-reaction. Plans to develop the Point Reyes Peninsula and turn Sir Francis Drake Boulevard into a freeway were derailed by the creation of the Point Reyes National Seashore in the 1960s.

Marin people have always lived out of doors, and Mount Tamalpais, which both divides the county in two and defines it, was an early target for people who wanted to keep the county's open space.

The Marin Conservation League, founded in the depths of the Depression, has led many fights. Marin was green before it was fashionable.

In the 1960s, conservationists, working with elected officials and local groups, defeated plans to build a huge planned community called Marincello on the Marin Headlands.

"Marin people took the lead in a national conservation movement," said Livingston.

On the other hand, retaining so much open space and forcing developers to fight to build new communities has led to a scarcity of housing. "The result was to make Marin very desirable and to drive up prices," Livingston said.

In the 1980s, it changed again - though central Marin is largely white and affluent, census figures show that a third of the population of San Rafael is Latino.

So it is possible that the heart of Marin County, founded around a Spanish mission, is coming full circle.