Additionally, Elder published two books for the Panama-California Exposition in San Diego, which opened just a few weeks after the PPIE and stayed open a year longer:
12. The Architecture and Gardens of the San Diego Exposition
271. The San Diego Garden Fair
On 8 June 2012, the San Francisco Chronicle ran an article about 19th-century tombstones turning up on Ocean Beach. Passers-by were puzzled, if not uneasy. “Why are there tombstones on the beach?” they asked. Perhaps they also stopped to wonder “Now that I think about it, why are there no cemeteries in San Francisco?” The answer is: there used to be, but not any more. Of San Francisco’s 27 historical cemeteries, only two (at Mission Dolores and the Presidio) survive: the rest were moved to Colma. The long, slow process began in 1900, when the City passed an ordinance forbidding new burials in San Francisco, and was completed in the early 1940s, when the last graves at Laurel Hill Cemetery were transferred to Colma.
The reasons behind the move were many. Many people didn’t want to live next to a graveyard; others felt land values were lower near cemeteries. Many in the 19th century still believed that “miasma,” polluting vapors emanating from decay, caused disease. Developers were happy to capitalize on those fears, as they wanted the land for residential and commercial use. Opposing the removals were religious groups—primarily the Catholic Church—and preservationists, who noted the lengthy list of San Francisco pioneers buried there.
Laurel Hill (left) and Calvary (right, behind Lone Mountain) cemeteries in 1938, shortly before burials were moved to Colma. Geary Boulevard runs up and down the center of the photo. Ewing Field, a baseball park in operation between 1914 and 1938, can be seen between Calvary and Lone Mountain. (OpenSFHistory.org)
Although the city of San Francisco paid for moving the coffins, the families had to pay the cost of moving the headstones and monuments. Many, if not most, could not afford this, so the city took the stones and used them in very unromantic places: some as paving materials for gutters lining the walks of Buena Vista Park, others for Ocean Beach and the breakwater near the St. Francis Yacht Club. Particularly saddening was the loss of the large crypts and Egyptian-style monuments, most of which were unceremoniously dumped into San Francisco Bay. (Your editor asks: San Francisco wouldn’t pay for moving funeral monuments to Colma, but they would pay to haul the monuments onto a ship and dump them into the Bay?)
In 1937, Paul Elder published a pamphlet called Laurel Hill. It was part of the last gasp of resistance from those who opposed the move. The text begins with an unsigned article entitled “Laurel Hill: Esto Perpetua! Have Not Our Pioneers Their Rights?”
Calvary (center) and Laurel Hill (top left) cemeteries in 1938.
We are in receipt of communications, from time to time, from a group that seems bent upon the destruction of Laurel Hill Memorial Park, wherein emphasis is placed on the statement that no real estate considerations are prompting the attempt. It is good to hear this, but difficult, assuming the fact is so, to understand what other motives are prompting the drive to destroy one of our most cherished historical landmarks. Is it possible that San Franciscans of the present generation include some who object to honoring our pioneer dead? Does the presence in our midst of cemetery reminders of mortality irk certain persons who feel the life current pulsing warmly?
Next is “An Open Letter to the Board of Supervisors, from ‘An Old Timer'”
Calvary (center) and Laurel Hill (above and to the left) cemeteries in 1947, cleared of burials and graded for development.
We feel that the final passage of an ordinance directing the transfer somewhere beyond the county line of the venerated dust of the makers of our history is quite too brutal in its finality … Unlike the western reaches of this burial ground, the eastern part that confronts the passerby on Presidio Avenue is beautiful, it is lovingly tended, it is the Stoke Pogis of San Francisco, and its tombs bear names that explain why San Francisco became a great city. Gentlemen, you must know—because you have had every opportunity of knowing—how many of our United States Senators, how many of our Governors, how many of those others who made our beloved city, lie at rest in those few acres—in the fine old phrase, in God’s acre.
The former Laurel Hill cemetery (center right) with new housing under construction (OpenSFHistory.org)
After several more unsigned articles, the text concludes with twelve pages of names copied from headstones and monuments at Laurel Hill. The list is by no means complete, since over 47,000 people are known to have been buried there. Only this section of the pamphlet has page numbers, but the numbers begin at “65,” suggesting that this section is an excerpt of a longer work. In general, the pamphlet shows all the signs of being thrown together at late, perhaps even desperate, notice. The preservationists simply couldn’t believe that the City would desecrate its own pioneers in this manner. Yet it happened.
Later in 1937, the Catholic Church removed its opposition to the removal of Laurel Hill’s Catholic section, and the cemetery’s fate was sealed. The last graves were moved in the early 1940s.
Updated 2026-01-18
The William B. Bourne monument at Laurel HillList of some of the burials at Laurel Hill
No apologies are offered for this book. In fact, we rather like it. Many years have been spent in gathering this information, and naught is written in malice, nor through favoritism, our expressions of opinion being unbiased by favor or compensation.
and then continue like this?
San Francisco! Is there a land where the magic of that name has not been felt? Bohemian San Francisco! Pleasure-loving San Francisco! Care-free San Francisco! … It was in Paris that a world traveler said to us: “San Francisco! That wonderful city where you get the best there is to eat, served in a manner that enhances its flavor and establishes it forever in your memory.”
So begins Clarence Edwords’s 1914 culinary history of the City By the Bay, Bohemian San Francisco. He starts by defining “Bohemia” as the “naturalism of refined people,” and the “protest of naturalism against the too rigid, and oft-times, absurd restrictions established by Society.” Edwords touches on each period of San Francisco history, each community of European and Asian immigrants, with recipes from most of them.
Title page of “Bohemian San Francisco”. The photograph on the frontispiece is of the Cobweb Palace, an old saloon at the corner of Francisco & Powell
Unsurprisingly, Edwords lavishes particular attention on seafood. (“The Bohemian way to have your clams is to go to the shore of Bolinas Bay or some equally retired spot, and have a clam bake.”) Bohemian San Francisco contains perhaps the earliest mention in print of the Crab Louie salad, and the book is credited with popularizing the Celery Victor salad (which was invented by Victor Hertzler, chef at the St. Francis Hotel).
Clarence Edgar Edwords (1853-1941) was born in Virginia and practiced medicine in San Francisco. In 1930, his physician’s license was revoked for performing an illegal operation. In 1933, the California State Board of Medicine restored his license and placed him on probation for five years. He is buried in Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma.
Though many—if not most—of Paul Elder’s publications have languished in obscurity, Bohemian San Francisco is one of a handful to be reprinted in recent decades. In 1973 it was published by the Silhouette Press, and in recent years by a number of on-demand publishers.
Page 18-19 of “Bohemian San Francisco,” where Edwords describes the Cobweb Palace
Edwords’s approach to food is probably best summed up by the toast that appears at the beginning of the book:
Our Toast:
Not to the Future, nor to the Past / No drink of Joy or Sorrow / We drink alone to what will last / Memories on the Morrow / Let us live as Old Time passes / To the Present let Bohemia bow / Let us raise on high our glasses / To Eternity — the ever-living Now
When a Californian calls something “old,” it’s usually not as old as something a Bostonian would call “old.” As a native Californian, I have often been reminded of this. “Well,” says my Easterner friend, “we wouldn’t call this ‘old’ back home.”
It turns out that this scenario is at least a century old, for it occurs on the very first page of The Lure of San Francisco:
“I believe you Californians have but two dates on your calendar,” he exclaimed, “for everything I mentioned seems to have happened either ‘before the fire’ or ‘in the good old days of forty-nine!’ ‘Good old days of forty-nine,’” he repeated, amused. “In Boston we date back to the Revolution, and ‘in Colonial times’ is a common expression. We have buildings a hundred years old, but if you have a structure that has lasted a decade, it is a paragon and pointed out as built ‘before the fire.’”
Frontispiece and title page of The Lure of San Francisco
The Lure of San Francisco is written as a long conversation between the narrator, a native San Franciscan woman, and her Bostonian guest. They visit the four principal sights of pre-1906 San Francisco: Mission Dolores, the Presidio, Portsmouth Plaza, and Telegraph Hill.
Unfortunately, the casual racism common during the late 19th- and early 20th-century intrudes into Potter and Gray’s book. In the chapter “The Mission and its Romance,” Potter and Gray trot out the tired reframing of the “lazy, roving” life of the California Indians, and how the Spanish “padres were not hard taskmasters.” Elsewhere, the inhabitants of Chinatown are called “slant-eyed” and “sallow-faced.”
The Lure of San Francisco, pages 8-9
The book has a beautiful cover with a nautical motif, and is elegantly illustrated inside with eight tonalist drawings by Audley B. Wells. It was one of more than a dozen books Elder published during the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.
Elizabeth Florence Gray Potter (1874-1959) and Mabel Thayer Gray (1870-1946) were born in Oakland, California, the daughters of George Dickman Gray, a lumber dealer, and Susan Hitchborn Thayer. In both 1880 and 1900, the family lived at 754 Tenth St. in San Francisco (a spot now underneath a modern freeway interchange); they may have gotten burned out in the 1906 earthquake and fire. Elizabeth married Frederick W. Potter in February 1906; Mabel never married, and neither woman had any children. They are buried in the Gray family plot at Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma.
