Maybe it’s something in the water or perhaps it’s the famous fog but San Francisco, apparently, has a thing for name changes.
One hundred and seventy four years ago today, the Alcalde (or mayor) of a hamlet called Yerba Buena changed its name to San Francisco, which already was what the adjacent bay was called. To mark this anniversary of Yerba Buena becoming San Francisco, today’s #stampoftheday is a dual offering from 1913: a 5-cent stamp picturing the Golden Gate and 10-cent stamp picturing the discovery of San Francisco Bay. Both stamps were issued in anticipation of the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, which was held in San Francisco (nŽe Yerba Buena).
Yerba Buena (Spanish for “good herb”) took its name from a kind of wild mint common on the Pacific Coast from Alaska to California, including the sand dunes around Yerba Buena Bay at the northeastern end of the San Francisco Peninsula. It was, according to the FoundSF, an online digital archive, “a less than ideal site to establish a settlement. It was surrounded by numerous steep hills, there was limited level ground, the water supply was poor and timber for construction was far from abundant. To add to this already unfavorable list, the climate in Yerba Buena was much less agreeable than in other parts of the bay: the weather was colder and the wind blew almost daily bringing in fog and creating swirls of dust and sand.”
But it was near the mission and presidio that the Spanish had established in 1776 and near Yerba Buena Cove which could shelter ships anchored in San Francisco Bay. After Mexico (which at the time included California) became independent in 1821, its government gave large land grants were awarded to former officers and prominent families who set up large ranches and raised cattle. Many hoped to sell hide and tallow to East Coast merchants.
In 1835, an Englishman named William Richardson, using two small vessels from the mission, began transporting the ranchers’ goods to ships anchored in the cove. A few other merchants followed and the settlement of Yerba Buena was born. In 1846, American forces, which had taken control of the area as part of the war with Mexico, set up most of their operations in the new settlement. A year later, its population grew when many of the 200 Mormons who arrived on a ship from the East Coast decided to stay in Yerba Buena instead of heading to Utah.
While all of this made Yerba Buena larger than other settlements in the Bay, its position was being challenged, particularly by a merchants in village at the mouth of Sacramento River that they called Francisca in an effort to create an association with the well-known Bay of San Francisco. (That city is now known as Benicia). In response, on January 30, 1847, Lt. Washington Allon Bartlett, the American soldier who had been appointed as Yerba Buena’s Alcalde, issued a proclamation renaming the town San Francisco. By early 1848, about 1,000 people lived in the town formerly known at Yerba Buena, just enough that it was big enough to become a commercial hub when the California Gold Rush began in 1848.
The city has not lost its appetite for changing its name. Earlier this week, the San Francisco Board of Education voted to change the names of 44 of its 121 schools. The board stated its goal was to remove the names of anyone who had “engaged in the subjugation and enslavement of human beings,” “oppressed women,” committed acts that “led to genocide,” or who “otherwise significantly diminished the opportunities of those amongst us to the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Our, for example are former Presidents George Washington and James Monroe, who both owned slaves. Also out is John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, who, an advisory panel said, was “racist and responsible for theft of Native lands.” The board also rebuked Abraham Lincoln (because he “is not seen as much of a hero at all among many American Indian Nations and Native peoples of the United States, as the majority of his policies proved to be detrimental to them”) and Franklin Roosevelt (who “refused to support anti-lynching bill (proposed by his wife) and other racist policies/views.”)
While many support the general goal, the board has come attack for both its timing and its process. San Francisco Mayor London Breed, for example, said that while she understood the impetus, “I cannot understand is why the School Board is advancing a plan to have all these schools renamed by April, when there isn’t a plan to have our kids back in the classroom by then.”
And others have note the advisory panel that made the recommendations the board accepted produced a report that, its members have conceded, “relied heavily on Google searches” and cited sometimes incorrect Wikipedia entries. Moreover, the group did not consult with any historians because, the advisory committee’s chair said, “what would be the point? History is written and documented pretty well across the board.”
Writing on the Mission Local website, Joe Eskenazi, an award-winning writer who was a columnist for SF Weekly, lamented that “the renaming process, which could have been inclusive and illuminating and fostered a discussion about community values and representation – and led to a lot of growth and understanding and consensus – instead became an insular process, beset by ignorance and incompetence.”
As historian Eric Foner, author of a Pulitzer Prize winning book about Lincoln, told Eskenazi, the problem is: “If you can only name schools after people who were perfect, you will have a lot of unnamed schools,” Moreover, as historian Alexis Coe told Eskenazi, “We need to talk about people who are historically significant in less celebratory ways and stop thinking about complications as a liability. We’re being confronted with all-or-nothing choices when it comes to our founding history, monuments, or school names. That’s not how history works, or our lives work, or how anything works.”
I think that’s the discussion we need to have. Whether it’s the discussion we will have, however, remains to be seen.
Be well, stay safe, “stop thinking about complications as liabilities,” fight for justice and work for peace.