Interview with author Terry Hamburg "Land of the Dead, How the West Changed Death in America"

This episode is an interview with author Terry Hamburg, who wrote a very interesting book on all things dying, death, and burial in San Francisco history. We cover the earliest history of Colma and specifically discuss one cemetery, Cypress Lawn. 

This subject matter might not be for everyone, but please know I approach the discussion about the history of death and burials in San Francisco with respect and genuine curiosity.  I think you’ll find it fascinating. 

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Transcript

Land of the Dead How the West Changed Death in America

 For as hard as I try to get an episode out every month, sometimes it’s more like every two months.

Today, I want to thank Josh from Visalia in the San Joaquin Valley for contributing to the Monkey Block Project. 

 Josh emailed me about a private tour of the Pueblo de Yerba Buena and you can, too. Guess what? It’s the same price as a scheduled tour. I’m happy to make something happen. Don’t be shy. 

 Thank you for reaching out, Josh. It was so much fun to meet you and your friend. We got to dork out about California history. It’s always nice to meet like minded people. 

Oliver: And now, for this episode’s, introduction.

Thank you, Oliver. A few months ago, I received an Event Brite advertisement for a wine tasting tour at a location you would never think to have this event take place. 

 Today I interview author, Terry Hamberg who wrote a book covering all aspects of dying, death, and burials in San Francisco history. I didn’t know what I didn’t know about this topic, because it doesn’t come up in my research. 

 This subject matter might not be for everyone, but please know I approach the discussion about the history of death and burials in San Francisco with respect and genuine curiosity. Having said that, if you want to know the difference between a graveyard and a garden cemetery, or how Golden Gate Park changed attendance at local cemeteries, then listen on. I think you’ll find it fascinating. 

Today, we are literally discussing … buried history. 

 Oliver: Now, on with the show. <harp >

Girlina: I'm very excited to be speaking with the author of a very interesting book called Land of the Dead, How the West Changed Death in America. And today I'm speaking with Terry Hamburg. Thank you for joining. 

Terry: It's a pleasure to be here. 

Girlina: I think it's interesting how we met.

Terry: We met in a cemetery. Where else? And, the event was a wine tour and, we met under a cork oak tree. 

Girlina: Where the Hotaling family is buried, of the Hotaling Alley fame. 

Terry: Yes. And, by accident, I found out you're a podcaster. And just by accident, you found out I was an author.

Girlina: Yeah, we started talking. I'm like, Oh, I have to interview you. Your book is very interesting. I have so many placeholders of things I need to finish.

Terry: My gosh.

Girlina: I haven't even finished reading your book, because every one of these is a rabbit hole that I had to research.

Girlina: You, opened my mind to a whole new topic. And listeners, you can't see this, but I have over 30 tabs on his book of different rabbit hole topics I needed to research. I've never thought about death. What happened in 1776 when the Spanish were here.

Girlina: It also doesn't come up in my research, to be perfectly honest. 

Terry: There isn't a lot of information. And, that's in general, about municipalities. But it's, especially true about San Francisco. Because the history is unique. It's not always complimentary.

Terry: People and city fathers don't like to talk about what happened in the past, especially to the dead. Because, they're dead and why talk about them? And if it didn't turn out to be, a situation that, everyone can be, proud of, there's little, talk about it. And it's true, on the East Coast, in New York, uh, in Boston, in Chicago, everywhere has their underground stories.

Terry: It's never celebrated because there was usually problems and situations that, today we look back on and say, how did that happen? 

Girlina: That is very true that history gets rewritten to be more favorable or to downplay things that don't play well in today's society.

Girlina: Because of reading your book, I had to find out as much as I could about what happened before 1849, because that's my area, it's interesting how little there is to say, there weren't a lot of people here, so there wasn't a whole lot of burial happening.

Oliver: What Terry references next is the population of the Pueblo de Yerba Buena after the 1846 US takeover, and before gold was discovered. 

Terry: The, the population of the city, Yerba Buena, which became San Francisco, was under a thousand. And without the gold rush, California would have become a great state. San Francisco would be a great port city. But the gold rush is incredibly instrumental in shaping San Francisco and California.

Terry: It's a history that people, I don't have to tell you, but there isn't a lot of documentation about San Francisco before the gold rush, because there weren't a lot of people here, there weren't historians or others recording information, journalists, so the gold rush brought attention, it's when, recorded history, made history.

Terry: for historians begin. And what you deal in is uh, almost like archaeology. 

Girlina: It feels like it, sometimes. 

Terry: Going back to before recorded history. I commend your field of interest because it is hard. You've got to figure out on the basis of very little information.

Terry: You're like an archaeologist in a way. A historic archaeologist 

Girlina: …that specializes in a very specific time in early San Francisco history. I can't go to one book open it up and read a chapter. I have to source this fact from here, this fact from here, this fact from here.  Make sure that the fact that I'm using is right by cross referencing all these other things. 

Terry: I feel sorry for you. 

Oliver: Girlina doesn’t need the ego boost, but go on, Terry. 

Girlina: I want to talk about something that was such a blind spot for me and a point of embarrassment in my research of early San Francisco history, which was pre 1776.

Girlina: It never occurred to me to think about how the Yelamu of the Ramaytush Ohlone, how they had what I believe was 15 different, shell mounds in San Francisco alone. And how unaware I was when I was walking around Soma, when I was walking around the ballpark, how burials happened even pre Spanish, and how little we know about that, and how little we're ever going to know about that, I don't want to put you on the spot because I know that's not your area of expertise, but for you, when you were writing this book, was there a moment where you thought about, hey, what came before the Spanish?

Terry: I decided as an historian, because I couldn't answer the questions. I didn't ask the questions. I felt I would leave it to people like you to fill in that part of the history. 

Girlina: That's a really good point that you just made as someone who tells history. Sometimes, I have to leave a topic alone, because I don't know enough to tell it in an articulate way.

Terry: But in the case of what you're doing, um, there aren't a lot of people who deal with that period. So, you may be more of an expert than you think because there aren't that many experts in the field.

Oliver: Goodness. Girlina will be insufferable after this interview.

Terry: Once you get into history where all the sources start coming together, you're dealing with a crowded field of historians and you have to eliminate certain sources. There's too much information. In your case, they're isn't enough. And, I think you're kind of a pioneer in a way.

Terry: I'm more of a sorter and an arranger of materials. You're dealing with a period where the primary sources are very limited and you're dealing with maybe one or two or three people And their perceptions and ideas about what they see. And who knows if they're really accurate.

Terry: But if you have two sources, you have to depend on that. But once you get into a period where everyone is writing and talking, and there's newspapers and, taverns and, books, then it's like finding out who's really telling the true story. You have a harder time with history than I do. 

Girlina: I will say the research is becoming easier now that I'm in the United States, California.

Girlina: Moving in time in 1776, I. naively assumed that the Presidio must have been doing burials there. In reading your book, why don't you tell us about the Presidio in 1776 and burials? 

Terry: There were, from what I've read and understood, not a lot of people there ever.

Terry: I didn't find any information about what happened to people who died. I assumed they were placed in the ground, with some ceremony. But, no one recorded it. There's no coroner's office or coroner's records. And, so we really don't know much about it.

Terry: The Presidio has a burial ground for veterans, for the army. It came much later. 

Girlina: That was a United States thing. And I never thought about it, the only place to bury people if you were Catholic was at the mission San Francisco the Assis, aka Mission Dolores. That was literally it.

Terry: I think that almost all the people at the Presidio were Catholic. I mean, they were from Spain. I don't think at that point there were any Protestants among them. The alternative was the Presidio, or Mission Dolores. Other than that, there was no place else to bury people.

Girlina: Nowhere official. And, the padres did keep burial records. I'm not willing to dig up that history, but I am also where it's not the easiest, record book to try to get a hold of. And, they did capture the deaths of the Californios. And the neophytes, I don't even know if that's a politically correct term to use anymore, but the neophytes, the indigenous who were Catholicized, but even those records are shaky. They're not as accurate as they could be. 

Terry: I don't have expertise in that area, but, you can assume many people were buried, especially the native. Americans without ceremony, perhaps on the spot.

Terry: People would die of disease, and I think there was a lot of, improvisation, to use the only word I can think of right now, in how you buried people. Even among Catholics who, thought of burial as sanctimony.

Oliver: At the Mission San Francisco de Asis, specifically, the indigenous were buried without allowance for their native ceremony. Other missions were less restrictive about letting the indigenous perform parts of their death ceremony. 

Whoosh

Oliver: Before 1849, during the hide and tallow trading phase of 1800 – 1830s, people died on their way to the San Francisco Bay. People who weren’t Catholic, who weren’t people of the soil, also known as Californios, died in transit. What is discussed next relates to this population.

Terry: Well, there were a lot of merchant seamen who, traveled around this area for trading purposes. And, of course, they died. I think most of them that were on vessels were buried at sea. An old tradition and a simple tradition and really the only one they had. 

Terry: Away from land and someone died, they were placed overboard. I mean, there was nothing else to do. You're not going to keep a body on board that is dead, perhaps a dying of disease. You would cast them overboard. And that was a standard practice for ships, from the earliest time.

Terry: Often, they die of disease. You don't know if the disease will spread, and so you bury them at sea, and that was considered honorable, and perhaps it was making a virtue of necessity, but being buried at sea was an honorable way to be buried.

Terry: There were ships that came into San Francisco in 1849, 50 and on that had cholera outbreaks and, there would be many dead and they are not going to keep people with cholera on ship. And if they bring these people to San Francisco, 1849, 1850, who knows what situations are set up. In fact, there were no situations set up.

Oliver: Terry references the Yerba Buena cemetery, which started in 1850. Not to be confused with the Pueblo de Yerba Buena.

Terry: There wasn't an official burial ground, you know, until Yerba Buena. So you buried them at sea. Even the reporting of this information is by newspaper usually. We know how unreliable a newspaper is today when we have all kinds of fact checking and reporters and technology, you can imagine how inaccurate it was.

Terry: There was a book, “The Annals of San Francisco”, which was published, I think, in 1855, and this is considered the history of San Francisco, the first history, and they covered the years from, well, they went way back in time, but they covered the years, since the gold rush. We rely a lot on these accounts.

Terry: And, there's an obvious political, social bias. These were upper class, gentlemen, and they had, all of the contemporary prejudices and, worldviews, and it comes out in what they write, but we can at least discern that. 

Terry: We're relying on a handful of reports, but, that's what we have, we can only write the history, interpret the history and say with the caveat, we're basing it on slim information. Again, it's not archaeology exactly, but it resembles archaeology in a way because, we don't have the facts and information that we're used to in a media oriented world.

Girlina: How did you get involved with Cypress Lawn? That's the cemetery we met at. 

Terry: I was in the antiques business since the early seventies. By 2000, I no longer wanted to be in the business because I couldn’t find the older stuff that I wanted to find, and, I wanted to do something else.

Terry: There was an ad in a newspaper in the Chronicle that wanted family service counselors for Cypress Lawn Cemetery. I didn't know what that meant where Cypress Lawn was, or what a family service counselor was, but my wife said, this would be a good job for you. And I said, what? Work in a cemetery?

Terry: And it was a good job for me. A family service counselor is essentially a salesperson, but you connect when the individual who comes in, a loved one has died, and someone has to take care of all of the procedures and information, and that's what I did, and that's what family service counselors do.

Terry: And to me, that is fun and it's not callous. So anyway, that's how I got into it.

Terry: Too long a story. But I was trained as an historian, as a student, I was in the antiques business. So it all fit together for me and Cypress Lawn is such a, cemeteries are such beautiful places, architecturally, aesthetically. And, it was just a beautiful place to go to work every morning.

Terry: That may sound weird to some people, but to me I enjoyed that work more than almost any other work I've done. 

Girlina: It was interesting for me to sign up for a wine tasting trolley tour through Cypress Lawn, but I was so intrigued by the fact that Thomas Larkin is buried there in addition to a lot of other people.

Oliver: Girlina is perfectly intrigued by the life and times of Thomas Larkin. Maybe she’ll do an episode on him some day. But, she’s been saying that for a few years, now. 

Girlina: Initially when we were in the atrium, is that where the hallways are with all the stained glass? 

Terry: Yes, the mausoleum, 

Girlina: The mausoleum. And it was strange at first to have a little bit of wine in a glass and walking down and seeing Teresa Bell of the Mary Ellen Pleasant fame and drinking wine.

Girlina: At first I'm like, “Oh, culturally, this seems so… yeah, I I'm over it. I'm having wine. I'm, I'm over it”. I have to see this in a different light. And I need to remove the taboo-ness of this and see this through a historic lens. And it really did shift for me. Going on that tour and seeing the historic elements.

Terry: Nick, uh, Wordworth. 

Girlina: And him, explaining that The place that cemeteries hold in our society and maybe you can repeat some of what he said or what some of your thoughts are on cemeteries. 

Terry: When I was the director of the Heritage Foundation, which one part of that was to encourage people to come to the cemetery.

Terry: I grew up like all kids grew up, you hold your breath when you pass a cemetery. It's not where anyone goes., And people regard this as, not only spooky, but sacred, so, I tried to change that perception, over the years I was there, saying this is a historical resource, and it's true, Really of all cemeteries, more true maybe of Cypress Lawn because it promotes it, but cemeteries do not mind if people come in and walk around, And if you do a little research on who is buried at a cemetery, and accept it as an historical experience, it can be incredibly enlightening.

Terry: In the 1950s, school teachers used to have field trips through the cemetery for fifth grade students, which, that was the year that the kids learned about California history. And Cypress Lawn was so filled with California history. I mean, you mentioned, one person, but it goes on and on. Hearst, DeYoung, McLaren, and on and on.

Terry: And they would take the kids to individual spots, and this is how they taught California history. Pardon the pun, it became alive in the cemetery when you actually see the monuments to these people. It really is a resource for history, but also architecture and art, and these individual mausoleums were built by generally very wealthy people, and these wealthy people became patrons of the arts.

Terry: And they would hire the best architects in the world, the best stained glass people in the world, like Louis Comfort Tiffany. They would hire, um, 

Girlina: Literally, that was Tiffany Glass, stained glass I was looking at? 

Terry: You may have looked at Tiffany scattered about the cemetery, and also major architects, some of the most important architects really in the world that were, working in, the Western United States, are represented there and, bronze sculptors who were world famous were there.

Terry: So, you had a man like Hearst, or Crocker, who had incredible wealth, incredible egos. They wanted to build monuments to themselves, and they hired the best architect, the best bronze maker, the best stained-glass maker and said, build me something. So there. are, I think, about 90 mausoleums at Cypress long.

Terry: Everyone had wealth. Some had great wealth. They hired very important people. So, it becomes a museum that actually rivals the De Young or the Legion of Honor, both of whose founders are buried at Cypress Lawn. And it is a museum of art, architecture, from, you know, 1860 to 1920 and if you know where things are and, you can do all this by doing a little research, looking at books and seeing who's there.

Terry: It's much more than what people think. 

Girlina: Going on that, trolley tour, and having it be part history, part entertainment, really changed my perspective

Terry: At Cypress Lawn, most of the wealthiest people came to California with nothing, as many examples, William Randolph Hearst was the son, he didn't build the monument there. His father, George Hearst, built it. He came with nothing. The De Youngs came with nothing. All of these incredibly wealthy people were in California.

Terry: They were essentially penniless or came with very little and 25 years later, they were some of the richest people on the planet. So, imagine being in your mid-twenties, ambitious, and 25 years later, you are so wildly successful that you have as much money as kings and princes in Europe.

Terry: Well, you're gonna think you're a god. And that didn't happen in Europe, but it could happen in the new world. And so, you built a monument to yourself that was a monument to a king, who became a king in a breath of history.

Terry: So, these were very egotistical men, mainly men. And they built these gigantic monuments. And you know, what did it cost to build it at that time? It costs generally in today's money around 10 million dollars to build a mausoleum. That was a lot of money. 

Terry: Many of the mausoleums were from, like, 1870 to maybe 1910. After World War II, there were very few mausoleums. It was so expensive because it was a one off. It wasn't fabricated.

Terry: The design you had to hire an architect. And he designed something that would never be designed again. All the materials were cut by hand one time. If you wanted to have stained glass by Tiffany.

Terry: These were people of incredible wealth. And they built incredible monuments, and the value of it for us today is that they hired the best architects and painters and stained glass makers, and we have a museum there.

Terry: I used to do a tour called Streets of San Francisco. And the tour would be to go to the mausoleums of the people at Cypress Lawn who had streets named after them, they were that important. And I think there were 17 or 18. Ralston, McLaren, um, trying to think of the other streets, Hayward, Van Ness.

Terry: Not even Colma in general, but just Cypress Lawn. 

Girlina: How did Cypress Lawn become so influential for where certain people got buried?

Terry: Well, in San Francisco, all of the dead were evicted.

Terry: Not just burials, halt, cessation, but eventually all of the burials were moved, or most of them, to Colma. And. Laurel Hill Cemetery in San Francisco had a lot of these people and they were moved to Cypress Lawn. So some of them were transplanted from, San Francisco to Cypress Lawn, but Cypress Lawn was the, the garden cemetery of San Francisco, the beautiful, tranquil oasis.

Terry: And it was, nonsectarian, which meant that, if you're a catholic, perhaps you wanted to go to Holy Cross, in Colma or Cavalry in, San Francisco. So this was the cemetery for the wealthy. And, the founder of the cemetery. Hamden Holmes Noble was one of those wealthy people.

Terry: He built Cypress Lawn to be a public cemetery for everyone, and the fact that there were, other than Holy Cross, it's the largest cemetery there, meant that, everyone came, but he built it specifically to attract wealthy, San Franciscans to be buried in a place of honor.

Oliver: And that explains why Cypress Lawn holds the remains of so many influential people to early San Francisco history. They were moved there. 

Terry: And San Francisco was becoming a place where you knew sooner or later that, everything, everyone would be evicted. And he used to, I'm using the word poach because it's actually true. The first mausoleum at Cypress Lawn was taken from, um, Laurel Hill Cemetery where, Andrew Jackson Pope, the founder of, Pope and Talbert Lumber Company was already buried. And he approached the family and said something like, you know, sooner or later that, you are going to have to move your mausoleum and your sacred family remains somewhere outside of San Francisco.

Terry: Do it now before the ban comes in. This is in 1892. I'm building a grand new cemetery in Colma. And give you a deal on the land right near the front gate, move your structure and your entire family, come to Cypress Lawn, set it up, and you don't have to worry about being moved.

Terry: And he took the deal, and that was the first mausoleum at Cypress Lawn in 1892. Fascinating. And by that time, others who, were already buried or whose families were dying realized they couldn't go to San Francisco anymore. First of all, it was, there was a burial ban in 1901 in San Francisco. No one could be buried in San Francisco.

Terry: And then eventually, they were forced out over a period of years. So, after 1901, anyone who wanted to build a mausoleum wouldn't build it in San Francisco. They couldn't do it. It was against the law. So they had to go somewhere, and Colma was set up as the alternative to San Francisco. And all the cemeteries in Colma were the only place to go after 1901.

Terry: So gradually, wealthier people who had mausoleums would have them moved to Colma even before they were forced out. The largest mausoleum in Cypress Lawn, is, the Flood Mausoleum. And that was moved in 1906 from San Francisco to Colma. 

Girlina: Before the earthquake or after the earthquake?

Terry: you know, I'm not exactly sure. I once asked Michael XYZ but who's, an important historian of that area, whether it was before or after and the record isn't really. I personally think it was before it almost had to be before.

Terry: But this incredible mausoleum had to be disassembled and all the mausoleums had to be disassembled, put on, transportation, by rail, or by a horse and cart, to bring them to Colma, reassembled, and then all of the remains had to be treated in the same way.

Terry: And this was a common procedure, and if you go through Cypress Lawn, you'll see Cypress Lawn was dedicated in 1892. There are many people whose gravestones predate 1892. So how did they get there? They got there by being moved from other places. Sometimes they were moved just by families who were moving and wanted to take their remains, but many of them were people in San Francisco, the mausoleums, were moved, ahead of the, the evictions that occurred, in the twenties and thirties, and they moved to, Cypress Lawn. It's true of other places as well, but Cypress Lawn had a reputation for being, the place for the rich and the famous and the influential.

Girlina: Can you describe what a garden cemetery is? 

Terry: Yes, I can try. What is considered the, the mother of garden cemeteries is Mount Auburn in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I think they opened in 1821. Up until that point, there really were no cemeteries in the sense of large, expansive, arbor heathens with rolling hills and beautiful pathways and lovely mausoleums.

Terry: People were buried primarily next to churches and they were called graveyards. And the graveyard meant adjacent to a church. 

Girlina: I had no idea that's what graveyard meant. 

Terry: Around 1800, there was a movement to establish areas of land that were cut off from the city itself, from churches, where the dead were, moved from a place where people were buried to a place where the living can come and celebrate, and commiserate.

Terry: And, communicate with, with the dead. And the idea was, it was a celebration of life. You, would, have, a beautiful setting. It would be a rural. or garden, and that's where the term rural and garden cemetery evolved. And it would be dedicated to that. The graveyards in most cities were old.

Terry: They were, not kept up. There wasn't enough land, so people would be buried on top of people. And on top of people again, It was dreary and it was becoming more haphazard and more dreary as rural turned into urban and more and more people were dying in cities.

Terry: So, this was a movement to make a beautiful place where, people had dedicated individual spaces, families could come and these garden cemeteries often served as public parks. 

Girlina: I was about to ask that because I, I feel like I've heard that people used to picnic in Victorian times 

Terry: in the 

Girlina: cemeteries.

Girlina: Go visit grandma. Let's pack a picnic. 

Terry: Well, that was the tradition, but also there was no Golden Gate Park, there was no Central Park in New York. So when, when public parks became popular, people, even in the old days, people would complain, My gosh, we're, picnicking among the gravestones and children would run around and knock over a stone or something.

Terry: It would be nice to have a public park. Park and when Golden Gate Park was built people started being drawn there for picnics and, ceremonies and, and public gatherings. But in the early days of, San Francisco cemeteries built around Lone Mountain starting in the 1850s.

Epilogue

This conversation was supposed to last 45 minutes, but it went on for two hours. This is part 1. Stay tuned for part 2. 

I hope you found today’s topic as fascinating as I did. I hope you see cemeteries, or at the very least, the cemetaries of Colma, in a different light. Maybe you’ll even be inspired to visit Cypress Lawn and locate Thomas Larkin’s 1856 monument and place of eternal rest.

If you enjoyed this episode and would like to support the Monkey Block project, you can make a one-time donation, like Josh in Visalia even in the form of going on a tour, or become a monthly contributor at www.buymeacoffee.com/monkeyblocksf. Your support goes directly to publishing the podcast as well as the Bart rides, books, sound effects, including Oliver’s voice, and other research.

Please share this podcast with anyone you feel would enjoy the content.  

Thank you for listening. This is Monkey Block. Retelling forgotten stories from San Francisco’s golden and buried past.