San Francisco is Built on a Ghost Ship Graveyard

San Francisco is Built on a Ghost Ship Graveyard

The Ghost Ships of San Francisco: Dozens of Wrecks Buried Beneath City Streets

Under the city of San Francisco, California there is a graveyard of ships. These ships date from the mid-19th century when the Gold Rush took place in California.

Many ships with gold prospectors arriving in San Francisco simply did not return to the ports they came from and had only just left in the harbour. Finally, the ships were built over and most of them forgotten with the passing of time.

Top: The Charles Hare Lighter was discovered during a construction excavation at the corner of Folsom and Main streets in San Francisco.
Bottom: An article about the ships buried under San Francisco in ‘The San Francisco call’, August 11, 1912.

However, the establishment of new building foundations or the discovery of tunnels beneath the city have revealed and opened them back to the public.

During the first half of the 19th century, San Francisco was a small village of little importance. In 1848, this little village became part of the United States of America, as a result of the defeat of Mexico in the Mexican-American War.

In the following year, the California Gold Rush began, when gold was reported to have been discovered by James W. Marshall in Coloma, California. Consequently, gold prospectors were drawn to the state, and the village of San Francisco, which, at that time, had an estimated population of several hundred, quickly grew into a city of several tens of thousands.

Sailing card for the clipper ship California, depicting scenes from the California gold rush. (ca. 1850)

There were two routes that could be taken by those wishing to join the Gold Rush. One was the overland route and the other by sea.

Assuming that you were starting the journey from the East Coast, the former was the shorter of the two routes, though the latter was the quicker one. It is perhaps unsurprising then, that the majority of the prospectors decided to travel by sea.

Many of these ships, having arrived in San Francisco, were abandoned in the harbor. In some cases, the ships were in too decrepit a shape to make the journey back to the ports they left, and their owners had sent them knowingly on their last voyage to San Francisco.

In other cases, crew members, including sailors and officers, joined the Gold Rush and abandoned their ships.

The number of these abandoned ships grew, almost reaching a thousand, which caused the harbor to be clogged. One of the consequences of this is that other ships had to be anchored in the deeper waters further away from the shore.

Collage depicting ships piled into Yerba Buena cove by Satty, from “Visions of Frisco” edited by Walter Medeiros, Regent Press 2007.

This meant that goods had to be transported over the shallows, and for this, porters were needed. Therefore, much money was spent hiring these porters, which reduced the merchants’ profits.

Eventually, the city authorities decided to solve this problem by having the shoreline brought closer to the deeper waters. Their plan was to sell water lots along the shoreline, with the condition that buyers did the land reclamation on their own.

It may be added that as the population of San Francisco swelled, so to was the demand for land, which was one of the reasons contributing to the success of this initiative. As a result of this land reclamation, the shoreline of the city shifted further into the Bay of San Francisco.

In the process, some of the abandoned ships were buried under land fill. Other ships were taken apart for their timber, and yet others had businesses set up inside them.

The ships were, in time, forgotten by the population. However, when the foundations of new buildings are made, or when new subterranean tunnels are dug, workers may occasionally come across one of these buried ships.

Excavations of a ship found buried in San Francisco.

This is particularly so in the city’s Financial District, which used to be part of San Francisco’s waterfront prior to the land reclamation process.

The positions (exact or approximate) of these ships have been mapped as they are re-discovered, and so far up to 60 of them are known.

Nevertheless, considering the amount of ships estimated to have been abandoned in the city’s harbor during the Gold Rush, it is likely that they are many more that are waiting to be unearthed.

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