The Curator’s Corner:

Next month, November, is a time to remember "those who have gone before us, marked with the sign of our faith." This November, take time to visit our Mission Cemetery and pray for those buried there. The mission’s primary purpose was to convert the local Ohlone and Miwok peoples to Catholicism. Unfortunately, Mission Dolores had one of the highest death tolls of all of Spain’s Californian missions. The first burial in the graveyard took place shortly after the mission’s foundation.

The first Californians were buried under wooden markers that have vanished. Old photographs show a much larger graveyard, before the church began selling off its land. Within our current cemetery, which is about 1/6 of its original size, an estimated 7,200 Native Americans lie there, as well as under the streets and buildings around the mission. The Mission Dolores Death Registers covering the years 1776-1930 list over 14,000 interments; most are below-ground burials with some in above-ground structures (crypts).

These days, about 200 tombstones remain in the churchyard, most of them post-Gold Rush. Among them stand monuments to Don Luis Arguello, first governor of Alta California under the Mexican government; Don Francisco de Haro, the first alcalde (mayor) of San Francisco; as well as land grantees (Sanchez, Noe and Bernal) who provided their names to neighboring streets. There are even three victims (Cora, Casey and Sullivan) of the Vigilance Committee, killed by vigilantes who took the law into their own hands in 1856. The cemetery has been renovated several times. For a while, it had a large replica of the Grotto of Lourdes, which was featured in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Currently, the cemetery includes a tule reed house to demonstrate how the local natives lived.  

 To be continued…..