December 23, 1921: During the construction of a memorial to the war dead in Lincoln Park (what will become the Palace of the Legion of Honor), a reporter from the Daily News finds crews scraping up bodies and coffins from the ground. The foreman estimates they have “taken up” about fifteen hundred bodies so far. The article scandalizes San Francisco with its graphic report of disinterred corpses scattered across the parkland:
The site of the $250,000 memorial to the dead was once a cemetery. It still is, but the bones are now scattered. In the excavation work for the memorial workmen have uncovered about 1500 skeleton-filled coffins. No provision was made for the reburying of the bodies. Workmen have cut down about nine or 10 feet in their work. Sometimes as many as four or five bodies have been pulled out in an hour . . . Just as I arrived one large and two small skeletons were ripped out of one grave. In the grave were household utensils. Besides the skeletons lay the coffin boards. Wrapped about them were the shrouds. Workmen steered clear of the mess . . . Here was the bottom end of a coffin sticking out of the sand bluff. Further along the bluff the head of the coffin. A skull there. The coffins poked out all along that cliff. At night, after the workmen have gone, small boys of the neighborhood kick their toes into the dirt. Why? One said that $35 had been found in one of the coffins. An expensive ring in another, he said. And the skulls—sometimes students at the Affiliated colleges bought them.
Summer 1993: During an expansion of the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, bodies are again accidentally unearthed. Researchers arrive to investigate, and approximately nine hundred additional corpses are recovered. The Los Angeles Times reports that two of the corpses still clutched rosaries; others were wearing dentures.
The Times interviews an expert who claims that thousands more bodies might well lie underneath the museum grounds. Remains and artifacts are turned over to the coroner’s office.
The team of archaeologists called in suggest doing an extensive dig. Museum officials decline. The lead scientist working on the site is Phillip Walker. In collaboration with Walker, Michele Buzon (as well as Susan Kerr and Francine Drayer) conducts a project involving the analysis of paleopathological data collected from the bodies. Their resulting report, “Health and Disease in 19th Century San Francisco: Skeletal Evidence from a Forgotten Cemetery,” appears in Historical Archaeology in 2005. To date, it is the only peer-reviewed academic article examining forgotten remains from the former city cemetery.
The research of this team suggests that these individuals were interred in the city cemetery between 1868 and about 1906. The research further indicates that they were most likely “poor, working-class people of European ancestry” as well as persons of Chinese descent.
Visitors to the Legion of Honor museum today will find no information about the discovery of the cemetery’s overlooked remains. The golf course holds just two reminders that a cemetery once occupied this land: an obelisk presented to the Ladies’ Seaman’s Friends Society and a modest monument honoring the old Chinese graves. But surrounding a tree near the seamen’s memorial are large granite pieces from the old cemetery plots.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Nicole Angeloro, Michele Buzon, Pilar Garcia-Brown, Hannah Harlow, Brooks Holifield, Jenna Johnson, Mark Kasprow, John Martini, Maggi McKay, Liza Nelson, Tracy Roe, Doris Sloan, and Erika West. I’m also grateful to the members of my Emory Medicine writing group; to my parents, Gordon and Marion Brown; and to my sister, Candace Brown. A generous residency at the Hambidge Center allowed me to begin writing this novel. The members of the Western Neighborhoods Project in San Francisco provided superb advice and resources.
Special thanks to Henry Dunow, agent and friend, and to John Freeman, teacher and historian. John generously shared a treasure-trove of knowledge about the Outside Lands of the city and county of San Francisco.
This book is dedicated to Mark Joseph Pelletier.
About the Author
STACIA PELLETIER is also the author of Accidents of Providence, which was short-listed for the Townsend Prize for Fiction. She earned graduate degrees in religion and historical theology from Emory University in Atlanta. A two-time fellow of the Hambidge Center, located in the mountains of northern Georgia, she currently lives in Decatur, and works at Emory University School of Medicine.
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