Lincoln Park

The land that became Lincoln Park, once part of Benito Diaz's grant, was bought by Sweeny and Baugh as the first station of a semaphore line that signalled incoming ships to the city.

The Board of Supervisors set aside about 200 acres near Lands End, running west from 33rd Avenue to 48th Avenue, as a municipal cemetery.

The City paid for a wood fence around the cemetery, a well, a superintendent's cottage and a ledger for recording burials.

Burials began: in its first six years the municipal cemetery took remains moved from Yerba Buena Cemetery and the bodies of people who died too poor to pay for burial elsewhere.

William P. Humphreys and F. Mow surveyed the cemetery and set out a plan after English landscape gardening and American rural cemeteries: 17 sections, named and macadamized avenues, a spring-fed reservoir for irrigation, receiving vaults, a chapel, a nursery, and pines, cypresses, eucalyptus and acacias around the southern entrance.

The Board of Supervisors began granting blocks to benevolent, social and religious societies for their members' burials; at least 24 associations received sections, among them Chinese companies, French, German, Italian, Scandinavian, Scottish and Slavonic societies, three Jewish congregations, an African American Odd Fellows lodge, the Grand Army of the Republic and the Ladies' Seamen's Friend Society.

The Kong Chow funerary structure, an open-air brick enclosure with a high inscribed entrance, an altar for incense and offerings and what appears to be a furnace pit, was built in the Chinese section; its inscription reads roughly 'Temporary Resting Place for Coffins Being Sent to Kong Chow Province'.

The Ladies' Seamen's Friend Society raised a 15-foot cast-zinc obelisk over its sailors' plot, bought by Dr. Henry D. Cogswell from the Monumental Bronze Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut, shipped in pieces around Cape Horn and painted to look like granite, at a cost of about $495.

The cemetery superintendent stopped the Chinese from improving their section, holding that the state constitution barred them from employing Chinese workers on public property.

The federal government took the southwest part of the cemetery land for the coastal fortifications that became Fort Miley.

The City banned new burials at the cemetery, which had taken more than 29,000 burials, over 10,000 of them in the indigent sections.

The Board of Supervisors reclassified the cemetery as a park and the land passed to the Park Commission, becoming Lincoln Park; only a few hundred bodies were moved, and an estimated 10,000 to 19,700 burials remain under the park.

Two Chinese funerary enclosures of brick and cement, open to the sky with high west walls, still stood west of the new golf course; only the Kong Chow structure survives.

Nearly all above-ground traces of the cemetery, including grave markers, monuments, caretakers' buildings, section fences and water tanks, had been removed or demolished as the Lincoln Park golf course was built in stages; the Kong Chow structure by Hole 1 and the seamen's obelisk near Hole 15 were left in place.

About 1,500 coffins and human remains were dug up during construction of the California Palace of the Legion of Honor.

Archaeologists documented the remains of almost 750 people from an indigent section of the cemetery during construction at the Legion of Honor.

Designated San Francisco Landmark No. 306, City Cemetery.