Image: Pacific Sun.
As San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries is finding its way into the world, I’m getting a number of intriguing emails from readers. (Today, I heard from a retired priest who used to work at Mission Dolores, who once helped a man find his great-grandmother’s burial spot. It turned out to be underneath the archbishop’s parking spot.)
Marin County Farm Cemetery
A week or so ago, someone emailed to ask me about a forgotten cemetery along Lucas Valley Road in Marin County. Even though I used to write about that area for the San Rafael-Terra Linda News Pointer, I didn’t know anything about the burial ground. I hunted around online a little, and came across some articles and a short documentary about this sad and fascinating spot.
The graveyard belonged to Marin County’s “poor farm,” a workhouse for down-on-their-luck Marin County residents starting in about 1880. There was also a pest house — a hospital for quarantining people with highly contagious, epidemic diseases like smallpox and tuberculosis — on the property.
Between then and 1955, about 600 indigent people were buried in this place, now an overgrown field with a scattering of bronze markers that bear only an ID number, according to the Pacific Sun. “In January 1881, William Dever’s body was the first to be buried in the cemetery, according to Warner. Dever, notorious for committing robberies and escaping from county jail, died in custody at San Quentin and left no money for his burial,” the newspaper reported. Only in recent years has the county added a sign acknowledging the site, along with a split-beam fence separating it from the surrounding terrain.
You can learn more about this burial ground by watching “A Silent Legacy,” a brief and compelling film made by two locals, here:
Hart Island
I grew up in California, so the first time I heard about the indigent cemetery on New York’s Hart Island was from the TV series Pose. In the first episode of Season 2, Pray Tell (Billy Porter) and Blanca (Mj Rodriguez) visit the island to find the grave of a friend who recently died of AIDS. In the 1980s and 1990s, Hart Island took in thousands of people who died during the epidemic. But it wasn’t always a cemetery.
Hart Island once served as a training ground for the U.S. Colored Troops, as a prisoner-of-war camp during the U.S. Civil War, a quarantine zone for patients with tuberculosis and yellow fever, a drug-rehab center and a site for male prisoners. In 1980 it became New York City’s Potter’s Field, a burial ground for the indigent dead, and more than 75,000 people are buried there now, many of them in mass graves marked by a single number. Thousands arrived during the peak of Covid-19.
Historically, the island was closed to the public, but in recent years its management was transferred from the city’s department of corrections to its parks department, and it’s slated to open up in the coming months. I hope someday I’ll have the chance to visit.
In the meantime, the Radio Diaries podcast is producing a series about Hart Island, telling the stories of some of the people who are buried there. It’s a moving and sensitive listen. You can check it out here.
Below, you can get a bird’s-eye view of Hart Island, courtesy of drone footage from USA Today: