Jerome Lincoln (1829-1896): Pioneer Banker

Lincoln Family Mausoleum (photo Michael Colbruno)

Plot 27

Jerome Lincoln belonged to that early class of California bankers whose lives bridged the distance between New England mercantile discipline and the raw opportunity of the Gold Rush West. Born in Boston around 1830, he entered business young and quickly proved himself capable in the world of trade, eventually becoming a junior partner in the Boston firm of Whitwell, Seaver & Co., dealers in general merchandise. It was a conventional path—until he followed the pull of California.

In 1854, Lincoln came west as a special agent for the firm, part of the steady stream of Eastern businessmen who transformed the chaotic Gold Rush economy into something more structured and enduring. Like many of his contemporaries, he stayed. Over time, he shifted from mercantile trade into finance, where his temperament—measured, reliable, and methodical—found its natural home.

By the late nineteenth century, Jerome Lincoln had become one of San Francisco’s established financial figures, serving for two decades as President of the Security Savings Bank. His career placed him squarely within the network of men who helped stabilize California’s economy after its boom-and-bust beginnings—men who turned gold dust and speculation into institutions, mortgages, and long-term capital.

His name also appears among the founders of the Colusa County Bank, organized in 1870 alongside a roster of prominent “Forty-Niners” and early California businessmen. That connection places him within a broader story: the spread of financial institutions from San Francisco outward into the agricultural valleys of the state, supporting farming, settlement, and regional growth. In this sense, Lincoln was not merely a city banker—he was part of the infrastructure that helped knit together Northern California’s economy.

San Francisco Examiner death notice

Yet like many of his era, the end came not dramatically, but quietly, and with a touch of the ordinary suffering common to the nineteenth century. In the winter of 1896, Lincoln endured a prolonged and painful illness—an extended attack of gout that left him weakened and confined to his home. In his final hours, he reportedly remarked that his heart troubled him. Shortly thereafter, at his residence on Harrison Street in San Francisco, he died at the age of sixty-six.

He left behind a wife, a son, and a daughter, as well as a reputation that seems to have mattered greatly in his time: he was described as a man who enjoyed the “utmost confidence and respect” of his associates and maintained a wide circle of personal friends.

There is something telling in that final assessment. Jerome Lincoln was not a figure of scandal, spectacle, or great public controversy. He was something quieter, and perhaps more essential to the California story—a builder of institutions, a steady hand in finance, and one of the many men whose names are now largely forgotten, but whose work made the state’s growth possible.

Sources: San Francisco Examiner, February 24, 1896; Colusa County Bank historical account (1870 founding records)

Sarah and Naomi Wakefield: Mother and Daughter Drowned in Ship Wreck

Wakefield Family Crypt (photo Michael Colbruno)

Plot 27

In the winter of 1901, Sarah Wakefield—a woman of means with residences in San Francisco and Oakland—had taken her daughter Naomi, then just nineteen years old, to the Hawaiian Islands. It was the kind of journey that marked a certain level of comfort and standing in the Bay Area at the turn of the century: a winter abroad, followed by a return to a well-appointed home on Harrison Street. Her daughter Naomi, by all accounts, was bright and accomplished for her age—already something of a young pianist, and the center of her mother’s life.

They boarded the Pacific Mail steamship City of Rio de Janeiro in Honolulu, bound for San Francisco. It was a routine voyage on a well-traveled route linking the Pacific world—Hong Kong, Yokohama, Honolulu—to the growing port of San Francisco. For passengers like the Wakefields, the journey promised a quiet conclusion: arrival at the Golden Gate, disembarkation, and a return to familiar streets.

Instead, they entered one of the most dangerous passages on the Pacific Coast.

San Francisco Examiner Front Page

On the morning of February 22, 1901, the Rio de Janeiro approached the Golden Gate under a dense and blinding fog—conditions that were not uncommon, but always perilous. Navigating the narrow strait required precision; the currents ran hard, the rocks lay unforgiving, and visibility could vanish without warning. In that fog, the vessel struck submerged rocks near Fort Point. 

What followed unfolded with terrifying speed. The ship’s hull was torn open, and because it had been built before modern watertight bulkheads became standard, water rushed in unchecked. Within ten minutes—ten—the great steamer was sinking stern-first into the cold Pacific. 

There was little time to organize an escape. Many passengers were still in their cabins. Others, confused by language barriers among crew and officers, struggled to understand orders. Lifeboats were few, and fewer still were launched effectively. 

Sarah and Naomi Wakefield were among those who did not survive.

Sarah & Naomi Wakefield (San Francisco Chronicle)

Of the more than 200 souls aboard, over half perished—making the disaster the deadliest shipwreck at the Golden Gate, a place that had already claimed hundreds of vessels in the nineteenth century. Mariners had long known the entrance to San Francisco Bay as both gateway and graveyard: fog, shifting tides, submerged reefs, and narrow channels combined to make it one of the most treacherous harbors in the world. The wreck of the Rio de Janeiro was not an anomaly—it was the most tragic example of a persistent danger.

In the weeks that followed, the sea returned its dead slowly. Bodies washed ashore along Baker Beach and beyond, identified where possible and mourned where not. Families scanned newspapers for names; friends waited for word that never came.

For the Wakefields, the loss was not only personal but material. Sarah Wakefield left behind a substantial estate—real property across the Bay Area, investments, and holdings accumulated over a lifetime. Yet the inventory of her estate, meticulously itemized in probate, stands in stark contrast to the suddenness of her death. Wealth could furnish a home, fund a voyage, secure a future—but it could not buy ten more minutes in a fog-bound channel.

Mother and daughter were buried together, their story now part of the quiet landscape of "Lower Millionaire's Row" at Mountain View Cemetery.

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Sources: San Francisco Chronicle (Feb. 23, 1901); Oakland Tribune (July 25, 1901); NOAA Office of National Marine Sanctuaries; contemporary accounts of the SS City of Rio de Janeiro disaster.

The Jones Family Mausoleum

Jones Family Mausoleum (photo Michael Colbruno)

Plot 27

The Jones family, whose mausoleum stands on "Lower Millionaire's Row" at Mountain View Cemetery, belonged to that class of early San Francisco merchant dynasties whose fortunes were made not in a single stroke, but through steady participation in the commercial life of a growing Pacific city. At the center of the family’s rise was M. P. Jones, a pioneer merchant who arrived in San Francisco in 1850, in the first rush of opportunity following the Gold Rush. Beginning in the mines and quickly transitioning to mercantile trade, he built a business that would evolve with the city itself—first in general merchandise, then in shipping, and ultimately in the importation of tea, coffee, sugar, and spices.

Jones-Thierbach ad (San Francisco Call Bulletin)

By the late nineteenth century, the firm—eventually known as the Jones-Paddock Company, and later associated with the Jones-Thierbach enterprise—had become one of the principal import houses on the Pacific Coast, dealing heavily in Hawaiian sugar and later in coffee and tea. The family’s commercial reach extended across the Pacific, supported at one time by vessels engaged in island trade, and later anchored in the wholesale markets of San Francisco.

From this mercantile base emerged a second generation that lived less like pioneers and more like participants in what newspapers of the day called “the swell set.” Among them, Milton Jones and Webster Jones appear most vividly in the social columns—sometimes for their business pursuits, but more often for their entanglements in society, sport, and romance.

Milton Jones, a man of means and a familiar figure in racing circles, was known to maintain a string of horses and to move comfortably among sporting men of the region. His life, however, was not without drama. A widely reported court case revealed a dispute with former associate Howard Blethen over unpaid funds tied to racehorse investments—raising the question of whether the obligation was a “debt of honor” or a legal one. The episode offers a glimpse into a world where gentlemen speculated heavily and settled accounts as much by reputation as by law.

Birdie Samm (San Francisco Chronicle)

His romantic life proved equally theatrical. His engagement to Miss Birdie Samm of Oakland played out in the newspapers with a mixture of earnest declaration and public contradiction. At one point he denied the engagement, then reaffirmed it, then clarified that he had only denied denying it—a sequence so convoluted that even contemporaries treated it as comic opera. The matter was eventually settled in favor of matrimony, but not before drawing in family objections and public commentary on the propriety of the match.

Milton’s life ended far from the drawing rooms and racetracks of California. While traveling east, he became stranded by a Union Pacific snow blockade near Cheyenne, contracted pneumonia, and died suddenly, his wife at his side en route to New York. His remains were returned west, where he joined the family in Oakland. The manner of his death—modern travel interrupted by the raw force of nature—stands in contrast to the careful commercial order his father had helped build.

His brother, Webster Jones, carried the family’s commercial legacy more directly, eventually serving as president of the Jones-Thierbach Company, one of San Francisco’s established coffee and tea importing firms. Yet even Webster could not entirely escape the pull of society’s spotlight. In one episode, while traveling in Paris, he placed an advertisement seeking a French tutor—only to be overwhelmed by hundreds of eager applicants, reportedly pursued through the streets by a crowd of determined Parisiennes.

Former Mrs. Webster Jones (San Francisco Examiner)

If Milton’s courtship was public, Webster’s marriage was secret. In 1902, he quietly wed his second wife Jane Stanford Yost—a society beauty—slipping away from San Francisco to marry in San Jose without advance notice to friends. The marriage itself was notable, but even more so was the broader social orbit of the family. 

His first marriage ended when his wife divorced him and entered into foreign aristocracy, becoming Countess Artsimovich by marriage to a Russian nobleman. The marriage had the formal approval of Czar Nicholas.

Through these marriages—some strategic, some romantic, and some contested—the Jones family moved easily between San Francisco commerce, Oakland society, and the wider world. Their story reflects a familiar pattern of the era: first-generation wealth grounded in trade and shipping, followed by a second generation whose lives blended business with leisure, speculation, and social ambition.

By the time of Webster Jones’s death in 1936, the family had largely withdrawn from active prominence, though the business legacy endured in the import trade he had led for decades. What remains today is not the bustle of their warehouses or the excitement of their social intrigues, but the quiet permanence of stone at Mountain View Cemetery—a fitting resting place for a family that helped build the commercial foundations of the Bay Area while living, at times, as though the city itself were their stage.

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Sources: San Francisco Call Bulletin (Sept. 2, 1899); San Francisco Examiner (Feb. 17, 1901; Apr. 17, 1900); San Francisco Call Bulletin (May 13, 1902); Oakland Tribune (Sept. 5, 1936); San Francisco Chronicle (Aug. 11, 1895); related contemporary newspaper accounts.

Nicholas Petris (1923-2013): Longtime Liberal Firebrand in California Politics

Nicholas Petris (grave photo Michael Colbruno)

Plot 49A

Nicholas Christos Petris was an American legislator whose long career in Sacramento made him one of the most distinctive liberal voices in California politics. For nearly four decades, he represented Oakland and the East Bay in the California State Assembly and State Senate, combining an orator’s cadence with a reformer’s impatience for the status quo. 

Born in Oakland to Greek immigrant parents, Petris grew up speaking Greek before learning English in school, an experience that shaped both his identity and his lifelong attachment to classical rhetoric. He attended the University of California, Berkeley, graduating in journalism, and later earned his law degree from Stanford Law School. During World War II, he served in the Office of Strategic Services, after which he returned to Oakland to practice law and enter public life. 

Petris was elected to the California State Assembly in 1958 and to the State Senate in 1966, where he would remain until term limits forced his retirement in 1996. His legislative record ranged widely but consistently reflected a belief that government should serve those most in need—tenants, farmworkers, the elderly, and the mentally ill. He was a principal author of the Lanterman–Petris–Short Act of 1967, which reformed California’s mental health system and curtailed the involuntary commitment of most patients. 

Environmental protection formed another central pillar of his work. As co-author of the McAteer–Petris Act, he helped establish the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, a landmark effort that halted the unchecked filling of the Bay and reshaped regional planning.  He also advanced early and often controversial proposals to combat air pollution—including an unsuccessful but widely noted attempt in the late 1960s to phase out gasoline-powered automobiles. Though the proposal failed, it foreshadowed stricter emissions standards that would later define California policy. 

In the Legislature, Petris was known as much for his style as for his substance. Colleagues recalled speeches laced with references to Greek philosophy and delivered with a moral clarity that rarely softened for political convenience. Admirers saw integrity; critics saw stubbornness. Both agreed that when Petris rose to speak, it was from conviction rather than calculation. His ideas were often described as ahead of their time—a phenomenon staffers dubbed the “Petris gap,” the distance between proposal and eventual acceptance. 

His legislative reach extended into housing, education, public health, and consumer protection, and his name became attached to institutions that outlived his tenure, including a health policy center at UC Berkeley and a state office building in Oakland.

Petris died in Oakland at the age of 90, the city of his birth and the political base he never abandoned. In retrospect, his career traces the arc of postwar California liberalism—ambitious, argumentative, and grounded in the belief that public policy could anticipate the future rather than merely react to it.

Sources: Wikipedia, Oakland Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Tracy Press 

Viola Barry (Gladys Viola Wilson) (1894–1964): Actress and Progressive Activist

Viola Barry - 1910 L.A. Herald

Plot 36, Lot 268 W ½ - Wilson Family Plot

Viola Barry, born Gladys Viola Wilson on March 4, 1894, in Evanston, Illinois, was an American stage and silent film actress whose career bridged the stock theater world and the early motion picture industry. She was the daughter of Jackson Stitt Wilson, the Socialist minister, lecturer, and later mayor of Berkeley, and she grew up in an unusually political household for a future actress. 

Raised in Berkeley, Barry came of age in an atmosphere shaped by reform politics, suffrage, and socialism. A 1910 Los Angeles Herald profile made her lineage central to her public identity, describing her as the daughter of Stitt Wilson and presenting her as intellectually aligned with progressive causes. That same article portrayed her as a supporter of woman suffrage and as a young actress with strong views on women’s independence and public life.

Viola Barry - Politics and Artistry meet

Her theatrical training included time in England, where contemporary newspaper accounts say she joined a Shakespearean company and performed major roles including Viola, Juliet, Portia, and Rosalind. By late 1910, the Los Angeles Herald reported that she had spent four years on the stage, including two with Benson’s well-known Shakespearean company, and was poised to become the new ingenue for the Belasco company.

Her most notable films included, Evangeline (1911), The Sea Wolf (1913), Martin Eden (1914) and John Barleycorn (1914). Her final film was The Flying Torpedo (1916), co-written by the legendary writer, director and producer D.W. Griffith, remembered today for The Birth of a Nation (1915).

Viola Barry and Jack Conway in The Land of Might (1912)

The October and December 1910 Herald pieces also show that Barry was marketed not simply as a beauty or ingénue, but as a serious-minded actress with unconventional opinions. One interviewer emphasized her independence, her dislike of conventional social restrictions on women, and the influence of a household steeped in public causes.

In February 1911, she married Hugh Ryan “Jack” Conway, the future film director and actor. The marriage lasted until 1918 and produced a daughter, Rosemary. She later married Frank McGrew Willis, the screenwriter and playwright who is buried with her in the Wilson Family plot. 

The Wilson family plot links several notable figures at once — Stitt Wilson, Viola Barry, her sister Violette, brother-in-law Irving Pichel, and Frank McGrew Willis — creating an unusually rich intersection of Berkeley socialism, early stage culture, screenwriting, and Hollywood history, including McCarthyism. [Read about the others HERE].

Barry worked in films during the 1910s and is remembered today chiefly as a silent-era actress whose life connected the reform politics of Berkeley to the emerging culture industries of stage and screen. 

She died in Los Angeles on April 2, 1964. Though never as famous as some of the men around her, her biography remains valuable for what it reveals about early twentieth-century California: the close overlap of politics, repertory theater, and the new world of motion pictures. 

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Sources: Ancestry.com; Los Angeles Herald, Oct. 30, 1910, p. 31; Los Angeles Herald, Nov. 24, 1910, p. 4; Los Angeles Herald, Dec. 6, 1910, p. 7; Wikipedia, “Viola Barry”; Find a Grave memorial for Viola Barry; Find a Grave memorial for Jack Conway.

Otto Wichers von Gogh (1856-1906): Anarchist, Playwright, Actor who died in 1906 Earthquake

Amalia Wicher and damaged Empire Theater

Strangers' Plot

Otto Wichers von Gogh was a German-born playwright, journalist, and theatrical performer active in Europe and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

He was born in Hamburg, Germany, in the mid-19th century and was the son of an actor. He received a university education at Halle-on-the-Saale and initially pursued a career in the theater as both a performer and writer. During the 1870s, he became associated with social democratic and anarchist circles in Germany. His writings, which criticized political and religious institutions, drew the attention of authorities. Among his early works were Gottes Evangelium (“The Gospel of God”), Proletarisches Manifest (“Proletarian Manifesto”), and Rettet die Kinder (“Save the Children”).

In 1879, Wichers von Gogh was expelled from Germany for his political writings. He relocated to Zürich, Switzerland, where he worked as a journalist, newspaper editor, and correspondent. He remained active in literary and political circles during this period. While living in Zürich, he also published The Misery of the German Play-actor, a critique of working conditions in the theatrical profession.

1899 Chicago Tribune profile

Wichers was later expelled from Switzerland following his involvement in a public meeting that was associated with civil unrest among Italian residents. After leaving Switzerland, he lived for periods in Paris and London before relocating to the United States.

By the 1890s, he was in New York City, where he participated in anarchist meetings and was identified in contemporary accounts as a speaker critical of monarchy and militarism. He continued to write and contribute to German-language publications during this period.

In the early 20th century, Wichers moved to California. There, he returned to theatrical performance, appearing as part of a family act known as “The Three Wichers,” which included his daughters, Frida and Molly. The group performed musical and dramatic sketches and appeared in vaudeville-style entertainment programs, including engagements associated with the Empire Theatre.

Wichers was also identified in later records as a sketch artist connected to the Empire Theatre.

He died in Oakland, California, in the 1906 Earthquake, when a building housing residents associated with the Empire Theatre collapsed. Contemporary newspaper reports list him among those killed in the incident. His daughter Amalia (aka Edith) was also killed. His daughter Frida survived, was taken in by an Oakland family, and eventually returned to her home in New Jersey.

No confirmed photographs or portraits of Otto Wichers von Gogh are known to have survived. His life is primarily documented through newspaper accounts, theatrical notices, and references in political and literary records of the period.

Read about the others killed at the Empire Theater HERE.  

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Sources: Chicago Tribune (Jan. 23, 1899); contemporary newspaper accounts of New York anarchist meetings; California newspaper coverage of “The Three Wichers”; Oakland death listings from Empire Theatre collapse (1906); An Annotated Gazetteer of Nettlau’s Utopians (Cambridge); Mountain View Cemetery records

Rev. Laurentine Hamilton (1826–1882): Controversial Minister Who Dropped Dead During Easter Sermon

Plot 8, Lot 8 (Batchelder Family)

Rev. Laurentine Hamilton died as he had long lived—speaking from the pulpit, engaged in the great questions of faith. On Easter Sunday, April 9, 1882, while addressing his Oakland congregation and reflecting aloud, “We know not what matter is,” he suddenly collapsed and expired before his parishioners.

His passing, on the day commemorating resurrection, was widely regarded as both tragic and strangely fitting for a man whose ministry had been devoted to the expansive possibilities of divine mercy.

Born in 1826 near Seneca Lake, New York, Hamilton was educated at Hamilton College and Auburn Theological Seminary. Ordained a Presbyterian minister, he came to California in the early years of statehood, first serving in Columbia, Tuolumne County, and later in San Jose, where he also acted as Superintendent of Schools.

During his time in the Santa Clara Valley, Hamilton joined members of the California Geological Survey in ascending a prominent peak. Reaching the summit ahead of the party, the mountain was subsequently named Mount Hamilton in his honor—a lasting geographic tribute to a man inclined to rise above the ordinary.

In 1864, Hamilton accepted the pastorate of the First Presbyterian Church of Oakland. There, his thoughtful preaching and intellectual rigor attracted a devoted following. Yet his theological views—particularly his belief that God’s mercy might extend beyond death—brought him into conflict with Presbyterian authorities. Charged with heresy in 1869, Hamilton resigned his ordination rather than recant.

He did not, however, relinquish his ministry. Joined by many of his congregants, he established an independent church, which later evolved into the First Unitarian Church of Oakland. In this setting, Hamilton continued to preach a message marked by tolerance, inquiry, and moral earnestness.

Contemporary accounts describe him as a man of “large humanity and charity,” one who practiced the compassion he preached. His sermons were noted for their intellectual depth and absence of dogmatism, reflecting a mind more concerned with truth than with conformity.

His funeral, held in Oakland, drew an immense attendance, reflecting the breadth of his influence across religious and civic life. The eulogy was delivered by Rev. Dr. John Knox McLean, himself now interred at Mountain View Cemetery, underscoring the respect Hamilton commanded even among those within more traditional denominations.

Hamilton was twice married. His first wife, Isabella Mead, died of typhoid fever in 1870. His second marriage, to Clara Batchelder, connected him to the family plot in which he now rests. Notably, his grave remained unmarked for more than a century, until a proper inscription was installed in 2005 through the joint efforts of the First Presbyterian and First Unitarian Churches of Oakland.

Newspaper In Memoriam and Grave Marker

His death on Easter places him in a small and poignant company. The American theologian Elhanan Winchester, another proponent of universal salvation, likewise died shortly after delivering a final sermon in April 1797. Across Christian history, a number of clergy and bishops are recorded as having died during the Easter season, long regarded as a moment of spiritual culmination.

Rev. Laurentine Hamilton leaves behind not only a name upon a mountain, but a legacy of thoughtful dissent—an insistence that faith and inquiry need not stand opposed, and that mercy may reach farther than doctrine allows.

Sources: Mountain View Cemetery Association records; Oakland Tribune, April 10, 1882; San Francisco Call Bulletin, April 12, 1882; Wikipedia.

C. (for Cash) Thomas Patten (1912-1958): Flamboyant Preacher Sent to San Quentin

Main Mausoleum, Section 7 Crypt 755 Tier 2

There are preachers who promise salvation, and then there are preachers who promise salvation...with a price tag.

C. Thomas Patten—known across Oakland as “C. (for Cash)”—was unmistakably the latter.

He arrived in the East Bay in the early 1940s with his wife, Dr. Bebe Patten, bringing with him a style of evangelism that felt less like a sermon and more like a show. There were brass bands, pom-poms, and cheering young followers in matching sweaters. Services had the rhythm of a pep rally and the urgency of a revival. If faith could be measured in decibels, Patten’s church was thriving.

And if faith could be measured in dollars, it was thriving even more.

At first, the giving seemed like devotion. But over time, devotion began to look like obligation. Congregants were encouraged—sometimes gently, sometimes not—to part with their savings, their paychecks, their inheritances. One woman later testified that she had given so much she often went without food or clothing. In return, the church acquired… luxuries. Among them: gold pianos. Not one, but two.

It was, perhaps, the only congregation in Oakland where the road to heaven was apparently paved in polished brass and lacquered ivory.

Patten himself cut a striking figure. He favored flamboyant suits—cowboy hats, tailored jackets—and moved through his ministry with the confidence of a man who believed completely in his own message. Whether that message was spiritual or financial depended on who was listening.

His critics began to notice that the line between prophet and profit was getting thinner by the day.

That line became the centerpiece of his trial.

The courtroom, packed with spectators and former followers, often felt like an extension of Patten’s own stage—only now the script had turned against him. In one memorable exchange, a prosecutor carefully enunciated the word “prophet,” as if to pin it firmly in place. The defense objected, insisting the real issue was whether it should be pronounced “profit.”

The room erupted. Even in disgrace, Patten was still capable of drawing a crowd.

Behind the humor, however, was a more serious reckoning. Testimony painted a picture of a man who had built not just a congregation, but a system—one in which emotional appeals and spiritual pressure translated into cash. Followers spoke of being told that God expected their contributions, that failing to give might carry consequences far beyond the earthly.

Money flowed. And where it flowed, it tended to stay.

Some of it, prosecutors argued, went toward grand plans—a new church, even an orphanage in Lake County. A promised land just over the hills. But to those who had given everything, it began to look less like a vision and more like a vanishing point.

As it turned out, Patten was no stranger to reinvention. Years before arriving in Oakland, he had already crossed paths with the law—convicted in federal court for transporting a stolen automobile across state lines. He had served time, reemerged, and rebuilt himself as a man of God.

But the past has a way of keeping receipts.

That earlier conviction would resurface in Oakland, complicating his defense and reinforcing the prosecution’s portrait of a man who blurred lines—legal, moral, and otherwise—whenever it suited him.

The trial stretched on for weeks, one of the longest in Alameda County history. By the end, the spectacle had worn thin. The cheering crowds were gone, replaced by the quiet mechanics of judgment.

The verdict: guilty on multiple counts of grand theft. The sentence: five to fifty years in San Quentin.

For a man who had once commanded a room, the silence must have been deafening.

Patten did not serve the full term. He was released after several years, but whatever momentum had carried him through Oakland was gone. His later life was marked by illness, addiction, and a restless search for relief. He drifted as far as Texas, seeking treatment, before returning to California.

In 1958, at just 46 years old, C. (for Cash) Thomas Patten died of a heart ailment. A short life, by most measures—but a full one, if measured in spectacle.

In the end, Patten left behind more than a scandal. He left a story—part revival, part cautionary tale—about charisma, belief, and the uneasy relationship between faith and money.

Was he a true believer who lost his way? A showman who found religion profitable? Or something in between?

Even now, the question lingers—like that moment in the courtroom
balanced delicately between prophet and profit.

Sources: San Francisco Chronicle (Nov. 3, 1949; Mar. 21, 1950; July 9, 1950; May 12, 1958); Oakland Post-Enquirer (Nov. 2, 1949; July 27, 1950); Martinez News-Gazette (May 12, 1958); Solano-Napa News Chronicle (May 12, 1958). 

Irving Morrow (1884–1952): Designer of Golden Gate Bridge "Above the Waterline"

SF Chronicle Image of Morrow

There are names that cling to great works, and others that quietly shape them. Irving Morrow belongs to the latter—an artist-architect whose hand defined the Golden Gate Bridge as the world knows it, even as history nearly let him slip beneath its span.

Born in Oakland and trained at the University of California and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Morrow was not an engineer but something rarer in American infrastructure: a designer with a poetic eye. When he joined the Golden Gate Bridge project in 1930 as consulting architect, the essential structure had already been conceived under chief engineer Joseph Strauss. What remained was everything the public would see—and remember.

Morrow took on that task with unusual authority. He was, by his own description, responsible for everything “above the waterline.” It was no small domain. The great towers—now among the most recognizable forms in the world—were refined under his hand. He softened their mass with Art Deco verticality, carving the steel into stepped, fluted planes that catch light and shadow, transforming brute engineering into sculpture. Contemporary accounts note that these “angled, furrowed surfaces” were distinctly his, elevating the bridge beyond mere function.

His influence extended across the entire visual experience of the crossing. The railings, the lighting standards, the toll plazas, and the rhythm of approach—all were shaped by Morrow’s insistence that infrastructure could be beautiful without compromising purpose. He designed the lighting not merely for utility, but for drama, anticipating the bridge’s nocturnal identity. Even the spacing of elements along the roadway reflects his sensitivity to proportion and movement.

Perhaps his most famous—and initially controversial—contribution was the color. While engineers and the Navy favored utilitarian grays or stripes for visibility, Morrow championed a bold alternative: “International Orange.” Far from arbitrary, it was chosen to enhance visibility in fog while harmonizing with the natural tones of the Marin Headlands and the Pacific light. As he explained at the time, the color emphasized the bridge’s contour and ensured durability against the elements.

It is difficult now to imagine the Golden Gate Bridge in any other hue; the color is inseparable from its identity, a triumph of aesthetic conviction over bureaucratic caution.

And yet, for decades, Morrow’s role went largely unheralded. Even at the 50th anniversary of the bridge, critics observed that he had been “almost forgotten,” his artistic vision overshadowed by the engineering narrative.

This neglect is not uncommon in American public works, where beauty is often treated as incidental rather than essential.

Morrow’s broader career was modest by comparison. He designed homes and contributed to major expositions, including the Court of the Ages at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 and buildings for the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939–40. But nothing approached the singular achievement of the bridge, where his restraint and clarity found their fullest expression.

His death, like his career, carried a note of quiet irony. In 1952, at the age of 68, Irving Morrow suffered a fatal heart attack while riding a San Francisco bus—an ordinary end for a man whose work defined one of the most extraordinary structures on earth.
At the time, as one retrospective would later remark, “hardly anyone remembered what Irving Morrow had given to us in the bridge.”

Today, every photograph of the Golden Gate Bridge—its towers rising in disciplined elegance, its color glowing against fog and sky—serves as an unspoken memorial. The engineers made it stand. Irving Morrow made it endure.

Sources: Wikipedia; San Francisco Chronicle, May 25, 1987 (pp. 52, 55) ; San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 14, 1938 ; Alameda Times-Star, Oct. 29, 1952

Lucy R. Peckinpaugh Smallman (1840–1920): Pioneering Artist, Collector & Benefactor

Lucy Smallman gravestone

Plot 11, Lot # 125

Lucy Smallman lived a life that reads like a catalog of reinvention—artist, educator, collector, and, by the end, a quiet benefactor whose work helped shape how early Californians saw their own landscape.

She was born Lucy Adeline Briggs in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, in 1840, a descendant—according to contemporary accounts—of the Pilgrim captain Myles Standish. Like many New Englanders of her generation, she came west in the decades after the Gold Rush, arriving in California in the early 1860s, where she would remain for the rest of her life.

Her name changed often, reflecting marriages and personal upheaval—Cole, Rawson, Peckinpaugh, and finally Smallman—but her identity as an artist endured. Early tragedy marked her life; she lost both her husband and infant child within days of each other in San Francisco in the 1870s. Yet she persisted, turning increasingly toward art and teaching.

Smallman became associated with Mills College in its early years, serving as head of the art department when the institution was still located in Benicia. She later spent two decades living in the mountains of Madera County and in Napa Valley, landscapes that would inform her work and sensibility as a painter.

Her artistic reputation rested largely on botanical studies and California landscapes, rendered with a precision that blurred the line between art and science. Late in life, she assembled and donated a remarkable collection to what was then the Oakland Public Museum: fifty paintings of California wildflowers, carefully organized by floral family and labeled with both common and scientific names. The exhibit was noted for its accuracy of detail and color—suggesting not just artistic talent, but a naturalist’s discipline.

That gift, like much of Smallman’s life, was both personal and public—an attempt to preserve the natural beauty of California in a form that could educate as well as inspire. It was also part of a broader contribution: she donated relics of the colonial era and Native American works to the museum, helping to build an early civic collection that reflected California’s layered past.

She died at her home on Cuthbert Street in Oakland’s Fruitvale district, remembered in the newspapers as a “pioneer artist.” The phrase is apt, though perhaps incomplete. Smallman was not simply among the first artists in California—she was among those who helped define what California art could be: rooted in place, attentive to nature, and conscious of history.

Her paintings, like the flowers they depict, were meant to endure—pressed, cataloged, and remembered long after the landscape itself had begun to change.

Sources: Oakland Tribune obituary (Feb. 23, 1920); Oakland Tribune exhibit notice (June 25, 1947); AskArt/biographical records on Lucy Adeline Briggs Cole Rawson Peckinpaugh Smallman; Find a Grave