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 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. One branch of the Jones circle extended into European aristocracy: a Mrs. Webster-Jones (connected through marriage) was reported to have become a countess by marriage to a Russian nobleman, with the approval of the Czar—an extraordinary elevation that placed the family, however briefly, within the formal hierarchies of Old World nobility.

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.