San Francisco: history and heritage

About San Francisco: history and heritage

By the ULTIMATE San Francisco Editorial Team

San Francisco was a small Spanish mission and a cove called Yerba Buena until gold was found in 1848. Within two years it was a city of tens of thousands from every corner of the world. Burned and shaken in 1906, it rebuilt itself in a decade, and has kept its reputation as the most open-minded city in America.

At a glance

Population: 873,965 (US Census Bureau, 2020 Census); about a third of San Franciscans are of Asian descent.

Names through history: Yelamu (the Ohlone people of the peninsula), Yerba Buena, San Francisco (from 1847).

A mission and a cove in 1847; a city of the whole world by 1850.

Shaped by: the Ohlone, Spain (1776), Mexico, the Gold Rush, the transcontinental railroad, the 1906 earthquake and the twentieth-century migrations.

The Ohlone

The Yelamu, one of the Ohlone peoples, lived on the peninsula for thousands of years, gathering shellfish, acorns and game. Their descendants, the Ramaytush Ohlone, are recognised as the original people of San Francisco.

Mission and Presidio

In 1776 Spanish soldiers founded the Presidio and Franciscans the Mission San Francisco de Asís, known as Mission Dolores; its adobe chapel, completed in 1791, is the oldest building in the city. Under Mexico a small trading settlement, Yerba Buena, grew by the cove; it was renamed San Francisco in 1847.

The Gold Rush

After gold was found in 1848, San Francisco grew from a few hundred people to tens of thousands within two years. Ships were abandoned in the cove and buried under landfill, where some still lie beneath the Financial District. The forty-niners came from the eastern states, Mexico, Chile, China, Australia and Europe.

Chinatown

Chinese immigrants founded Chinatown around 1848, the oldest in North America. Despite the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the community endured and rebuilt after 1906 in the pagoda-roofed style you see today.

1906

On 18 April 1906 an earthquake and the fires that followed destroyed most of the city. San Francisco rebuilt fast and celebrated with the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915, whose Palace of Fine Arts survives. The Bay Bridge (1936) and the Golden Gate Bridge (1937) followed.

The open city

The Beat poets of North Beach in the 1950s, the Summer of Love in Haight-Ashbury in 1967 and the Castro’s gay community made San Francisco a symbol of freedom; from the late twentieth century the tech industry made it rich. Cable cars, running since 1873 and now a National Historic Landmark, still climb its hills.

Our advice: start at Mission Dolores, ride a cable car to Chinatown and North Beach, and walk across the Golden Gate Bridge from the Presidio in the morning before the fog lifts.

Sources

Population: US Census Bureau, 2020 Census. History: National Park Service (Presidio of San Francisco; Golden Gate National Recreation Area); Mission Dolores; California Historical Society; San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (cable cars).

Opening hours, prices and seasonal openings change, so please check with San Francisco: history and heritage before you go.