In the summer of 2019, construction crews working near the northeastern corner of San Francisco’s Lincoln Park dug up something they weren’t expecting: a coffin.
The workers were creating new bioswales along El Camino Del Mar, designed to divert stormwater during heavy rains and keep the tony Sea Cliff neighborhood from flooding. In the process, and under the watchful eye of an archaeologist hired by the city, they would end up uncovering the graves of at least 20 people, dating back to the end of the 19th century.
A secret lies beneath the manicured lawns of Lincoln Park Golf Course. These gentle slopes were once the home of one of San Francisco’s largest graveyards. Between 1870 and about 1900, 29,000 people were buried in Golden Gate Cemetery, named for its proximity to the entrance to San Francisco Bay, though most people called it City Cemetery. The majority were new burials, although a few hundred had been relocated from the city’s earlier cemeteries. And many of City Cemetery’s graves stayed where they were when other cemeteries in San Francisco eventually were moved out of town. Somewhere between 10,000 and 22,000 are still there, including the ones the bioswale workers found. Those thousands of graves hold the stories of San Francisco’s builders, of immigrants and low-income laborers, many of whom died destitute and alone. They tell a tale of how San Francisco has, again and again, favored its wealthy and privileged residents over its poor and marginalized ones.
At first, there was no way of knowing whom the graves on El Camino Del Mar belonged to. City Cemetery’s grave markers were removed more than a century ago, when the burial ground closed. The city didn’t have a detailed map of the 200-acre cemetery, which contained over two dozen plots that belonged to different community organizations—often nonprofits that helped take financial care of members and their families. Many of them were Chinese and were overseen by the Chinese Six Companies, a group of benevolent associations formed in the 19th century. As archaeologists studied the remains, they reached out to historians Alex Ryder and John Martini, who were working on reconstructing a City Cemetery map—partly for situations just like this.
As it turned out, the area where workers found the bones had once belonged to the French Mutual Benevolent Society of San Francisco. A number of the skeletons showed signs of autopsies and other postmortem
