I spend a lot of time writing about local history for KQED. Most days you can find me wading through old newspaper clippings, library archives and museum collections digging up the forgotten stories of our Bay Area predecessors. Because of this, I thought I knew a fair amount about San Francisco’s messy history of burying the dead in one place, then half-heartedly digging them up and reburying them in another. I was not, however, prepared for everything Beth Winegarner unearths in her new book, San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries.
What most people in the Bay Area already know is that the city moved the vast majority of its dead to Colma in the 1930s. That, at least, is the common narrative. What Winegarner uncovers here is a far more shocking tale — one in which San Francisco remains awash with dead bodies that are simply lacking grave markers. And we’re not just talking about the handful that have popped up over the years during construction work.
The bodies that were moved to Colma came from San Francisco’s four main cemeteries — Laurel Hill, Masonic, Odd Fellows and Calvary — all of which were positioned on the north side of the city. However, San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries thoroughly charts all of the other places that city dwellers once used as graveyards — and many are in unexpected, and under-discussed, locations. Dolores Park, for example, was a Jewish cemetery. Russian Hill is named for the fact that Russian sailors were buried there in 1848. Bodies were buried at First and Minna downtown. Most shockingly of all, Civic Center was once home to an enormous cemetery named Yerba Buena. (And a smaller one known as Green Oak.)
The Yerba Buena graveyard started at Market and Larkin and stretched all the way up to where City Hall stands today. It was opened in 1850, contained an unmarked mass grave of 800 bodies moved from North Beach, and was filled with between 7,000 and 9,000 bodies within the first eight years of its existence. In 1868, the dead were disinterred and moved again — at least, they were supposed to be. In truth, hundreds of bodies were left behind, under what is now Civic Center Plaza, City Hall, the Asian Art Museum and the Library.
According to Winegarner, few corners of the city are actually free of former residents’ bodies. Keep in mind that the Mission Dolores graveyard once contained between 10,000 and 11,000 bodies. And while only 200 or so are marked by gravestones today, thousands of dead remain under 16th Street and the surrounding buildings, many of them the Indigenous people who built the mission in the first place.
