The original Mission Dolores cemetery was much larger than what’s left behind today. Thousands of bodies remain under 16th Street and the surrounding area. (OpenSFHistory / wnp71.1458)
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.)
View northwest across today’s Dolores Park, in 1870, when the plot was still home to a Jewish cemetery. (OpenSFHistory / wnp37.02113-L)
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.
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All this barely scratches the surface of the many grim realities uncovered in San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries. But Winegarner makes absorbing this macabre information bearable — even thrilling at times — through calm and careful writing. She is entirely uninterested in sensationalizing her meticulously researched facts. She is also conscientious when it comes to humanizing the people buried beneath our streets, sporadically telling individuals’ stories in a way that brings them to life once more.
By the end of the book — a journey that chronicles the history of San Francisco’s cemeteries from early settlers burying friends where they lay, all the way to the big Colma move — one gets the distinct sense that Winegarner wants only for us to be more mindful as we move through the city. In many ways, she is imploring us to pay our respects to those who still lie beneath our feet. And after reading her book, you’ll absolutely feel compelled to.
“Ultimately, it doesn’t matter much whether San Francisco’s dead, especially its marginalized dead, were left behind intentionally or through neglect,” Winegarner writes in her final chapter. “The result is the same: their descendants, by both blood and geography, have no way of finding and connecting with them in a tangible way.
“Given that these were the people who physically built the city we know as San Francisco, we are all their children of a kind,” she concludes, “and we owe them a debt of respect.”
