James Townsend - Lumber Pioneer

[Gravestone photo by Michael Colbruno; Center photo of train used to haul redwood from the L.E. White Lumber Company; Bottom photo of the L.E. White Lumber Company]

Plot 6

James Townsend (1830-1900) was a pioneer lumberman who was the superintendent of the L.E. White Lumber Company in Mendocino County. He arrived from Lowell, Massachusetts in the Gold Rush year of 1849. He sailed from Boston on April 5th aboard the Areatus around Cape Horn, arriving in San Francisco on September 22nd.

He dabbled in mining, but gave it up after having only minor success. He took off for the Sandwich Islands and returned in 1852, where he started working for G.M. Burnham’s saw mill in Woodside, California. In 1853, Townsend became the superintendent of the mill and soon opened his own mill nearby. Two years later, he moved to Mendocino County and continued his work as a superintendent of the Albion Mill and later the Noyo Mill.

In December 1859, he married Martha Milton and they had two sons, James and Fred.

In 1861, he began his association with Lorenzo E. White, working at a number of his business entities including the mill and the Salmon Creek Railroad Company. The home for the executives of the L.E. White Lumber Company is now the Elk Cove Inn, a bed and breakfast overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Townsend's gravestone epitaph simply reads, "A Pioneer."

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Robert Watt - Miner, Politician, Businessman

[Photo by Michael Colbruno]

Plot 33

Robert Watt (1832-1907) was a native of Scotland who arrived in California in 1851 where he amassed a fortune in mining.

Watt was also a political and business figure of note. He served as California’s State Bank Commissioner and State Controller (1867-1871), but retired from politics in the 1870s.

He became one of the prime promoters of the San Joaquin Valley Railroad, which later became the Atchison, Topeka & Sante Fe Railway Company. He was president of the drug firm Langley & Michaels at the time of his death. He also served as vice-president and director of the Union Trust Company, director of the San Francisco Savings Union and a director of the Wells Fargo Nevada National Bank.

Watt was riding in a carriage with his wife in San Francisco when a Sutter Street street car hit them. Their carriage was flipped completely around, tossed over the curb and shattered to pieces. Although he survived the accident he died of heart failure five months later.

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David Stockton McDougal - Naval Hero

[Gravestone photo by Michael Colbruno; the USS McDougal; portrait of McDougal; the Wyoming]

Plot 17

Rear Admiral David Stockton McDougal (1809-1882) was born in Ohio and was an officer in the United States Navy during the period of the American Civil War.

In 1828, he was appointed midshipman and over the next three decades he served in the Mediterranean, West Indies and Home Squadrons, as well on the Great Lakes in Michigan. He commanded three ships, the Warren (1854-56), John Hancock (1856) and the Wyoming (1862-64).

His greatest accomplishments occurred while commandeering the Wyoming, as he protected American merchant ships from pirates and Confederate raiders. In 1862, the Wyoming under McDougal’s command, joined the hunt for the elusive CSS Alabama in the western Pacific. Although he allegedly came within 25 miles of the Alabama, he never caught up with the ship. Instead, McDougal was told to head to Japan.

On July, 16, 1863, during the naval battle of Shimonoseki, the Wyoming boldly entered the Straits of Shimoneseki to engage shore batteries and three ships of Prince Mori, clan chieftain of the Choshu. During the 75 minute battle, McDougal sank one ship, heavily damaged the other two, and pounded shore guns. This victory protected American treaty rights in the western Pacific.

Many historians assert that this was one of the greatest naval victories in our history, despite being largely forgotten today. McDougal, for all of his efforts, received no promotion and not even contemporary fame among his countrymen, as 1863 was a crucial year of the Civil War, and his exploits in far-away Japan were lost in bloody battles raging at home. As Theodore Roosevelt once said of this fight, "Had that action taken place at any other time than during the Civil War, its fame would have echoed all over the world."

On December 23, 1869, McDougal assumed command of the South Pacific Squadron. He retired on September 27, 1871 and was appointed rear admiral on August 24, 1873.

He died on August 7, 1882 in San Francisco and two ships have been named the USS McDougal in his honor.

If you're a Civil War buff, check out the blog at http://www.brettschulte.net/CWBlog/.

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Captain Murray Davis - Founder of Camp Winfield Scott

[Photo by Michael Colbruno]

Plot 6

Captain Murray Davis (18??-1877) was a member of the 8th United States Cavalry, Company A. Along with Lieutenant John Lafferty, his second in command, he established Camp Winfield Scott, on December 12, 1866 in Paradise Valley. The camp was created to protect travelers and settlers from the Native Americans, who were feuding with new arrivals. The camp was abandoned in February 1871.

This is from a June 1867 Secretary of War report:
On the 17th of January, 1867, in accordance with post orders issued by Captain Murray Davis, at Camp Winfield Scott, Nevada, Second Lieutenant John Lafferty, Sergeants J. Kelley and Edward Flanigan, and twelve privates of the eighth United States cavalry, started on a scout after Indians. On the 18th two Indians were killed and a rancheria and some provisions destroyed. On the 21st the command returned to Camp Scott. During the expedition severe storms of snow and rain were encountered and much suffering endured by the men, the cold being extreme. Sargeant Kelley was wounded in the hand by and arrow. Lieutenant Lafferty and the non-commissioned officers and men of his detachment are much commended by Captain Davis for their energy and perseverance, and for the faithful manner in which they carried out the instructions given them.

There are also records of a Captain Murray Davis who was involved in the investigation of the treatment of former slaves after their emancipation following the Civil War. I have not been able to confirm if he is the same person who was at Camp Scott.

Mary Park Benton - California's First Woman Painter; Zinc Gravestone

[Gravestone photo by Michael Colbruno; Benton picture from Oakland Tribune]

Plot 10

Mary Park Benton (1815-1910) was a noted artist, educator and activist. Born in Boston, she was educated in New York City and started her art education at the age of eight with drawing classes.

In 1855, she traveled to California to join her husband who had arrived three years earlier. She began teaching Sunday school and art classes to raise money for the church restoration.

She established a reputation as an outstanding painter of landscapes, portraits, still lifes and mission subjects. Benton and Abby Tyler Oakes (1823-1898) were the state's first two professional women artists.

In June 2006, her painting “Yosemite Valley” was stolen from the Pioneer Congregational Church in Sacramento, which was founded by her brother-in-law John Augustine Benton. The canvas was valued at $100,000. [UPDATE: A man who was helping his friend move out of his apartment near the UC Davis Medical Center saw the painting, which had been covered with a sheet. He recognized the painting from news reports and reported it to authorities. The man said that he had been robbed before and knew what it felt like, so he did "the right thing." The church now has the painting back.]

Her gravestone is made of zinc, which were primarily produced between 1874-1914 and were marketed as a cheaper and more durable alternative to marble.

William Henry "W.H." Bovee (1824-1894) - Coffee Pioneer & Oakland Mayor

[Photo by Michael Colbruno]

Plot 4, Lot 251

William Henry Bovee was born in New York City in 1823. On his mother's side of the family he was related to the Knickerbockers of New York. He graduated from Kethchum School #7 at the age of 15 and moved to Sandusky, Ohio where he worked as a clerk in his uncle's boot and shoe making shop. At age 19, he married Elizabeth Marshall.

Bovee did not like Ohio and promptly returned to New York where found a fulfilling job at a coffee warehouse. He then accepted a job with Hope Mills, one of the leading coffee and spice companies in the country. However, after hearing about the discovery of gold in California, he boarded the Apollo on January 12, 1849 and set sail for San Francisco. He disembarked in Rio de Janeiro and finished his journey aboard the Xylon.

Bovee tried his hand in the gold fields near Sutter's Mill but after sending one of his men to buy provisions and losing all of his money, he decided to return to the coffee trade he had learned in New York. In 1850, William Bovee opened the first coffee roasting plant in San Francisco located at Broadway and Dupont . One of his employees was a 27-year-old named Jim Folger. There was no roast coffee then available in northern California and ground coffee was unheard of in the mining camps.

Bovee called his new business the Pioneer Steam Coffee & Spice Mill although there was no steam engine and the mill was often powered by Jim Folger’s hands. From his time digging for gold Bovee knew that ground coffee, ready to brew, was what busy miners would want. He roasted, ground and packaged ready-to-brew coffee in labeled tins. In 1859, Bovee sold his coffee company to Folger, who had gone to Auburn and struck gold. [Some accounts list the sale as 1865]. Bovee reinvested $250,000 in mining interests in Calaveras County and lost nearly everything.

Upon his return, he lived in Oakland for awhile and dabbled in politics. He was staunchly pro-Union and was elected to the Board of Alderman, Oakland City Council and Board of Education. Bovee served as Mayor of Oakland in 1863 and 1864.

According to the Alameda County History, Bovee also served on the original Board of Directors of Mountain View Cemetery founded in June 1863, but he was not on the Mountain View Cemetery Association founded in December 1863:

Mountain View cemetery...was selected and purchased in the latter part of the year 1863; it consisted of about two hundred acres and comprised a vale among the foothills. It was situated about a mile and a half east of Oakland. The following constituted the first board of directors: Hiram Tubbs, Dr. Samuel Merritt, J. A. Emery, Rev. I. H. Brayton, William Faulkner, S. E. Alden, Rev. T. S. Wells, G. E. Grant, J. E. Whitcher, Major R. W. Kirkham, W. H. Bovee, Henry Robinson...In December, 1863, a few men formed an organization under the name of the Mountain View Cemetery Association. The first trustees were: Hiram Tubbs, Geo. E. Grant, A. M Crane, J. A. Mayhew, Rev. S. T. Wells, S. E. Alden, Rev. H. I. Brayton, Dr. S. Merritt, J. E. Whitcher, R. W. Heath, Wm. Faulkner and J. S. Emery. Early in 1864 the association completed the organization and elected Dr. Samuel Merritt, president, J. E. Whitcher, secretary, and Hiram Tubbs, treasurer.

In 1868, Bovee entered the real estate business with great success. In 1885, he created a real estate firm with his son-in-law called Bovee, Toy & Company Real Estate.

Bovee died from marasmus in 1894.

Peter Thomson - Haberdasher, Councilman, Cemetery Trustee

[Photo by Michael Colbruno]

Plot 4

Peter Thomson (1824-1901) was born in Elmburg, Scotland in 1824 and sailed for New York in 1848. He operated a haberdashery for three years before embarking for San Francisco where he opened a store. He retired in 1879 and moved to Oakland.

After moving to Oakland he bought and sold property, served on the city council in 1881 and 1882, served as president of the St. Andrew’s Society and was a trustee of Mountain View Cemetery from 1888-1901.

Dr. John Knox McLean - Religious Leader; Maclean's Cross

Dr. John Knox McLean was born in Jackson, N.Y. and graduated from the Princeton Theological Seminary in 1861. That same year he married Sarah Hawley of Salem, N.Y. and he was ordained pastor of the Congregational Church of Fairview, N.Y. He went on to pastor in Springfield, Illinois..

Fascinated by the Transcontinental Railroad and tales of the West, McLean visited California in 1871 and immediately fell in love with its splendors. In April 1872, the couple moved to Oakland, CA where he became pastor of the First Congregational Church in Oakland. He remained in that post until 1895. Under his leadership, church membership increased from 241 to 1183 and a new church had to built. In 1901, he became the President of the School of Religion.

He considered his important work his involvement with the Pacific Theological Seminary, where joined the Board of Trustees in 1873 and served as President from 1880-1910. McLean believed that in order for the Seminary to thrive, it needed to move from Oakland to Berkeley, where it could establish a close relationship with the University of California. In 1912, he was elected President Emeritus of the Seminary.

McLean became good friends with Mountain View Cemetery denizen Joseph Le Conte, founder of the Sierra Club. He became a charter member of the organization and even contributed to the Sierra Club Bulletin. He was known to camp on the banks of the McCloud River near Mt. Shasta. A lover of hiking, he was known to have climbed
mountains in the Alps, Sierra and Rocky Mountains.

In 1903, Governor George Pardee appointed McLean to the State Board of Charities and Corrections, where he was eventually elected chair. He was known to go directly to the Governor and plead for clemency if he believed that a young man had served enough time in prison. From 1887-1897, he was a Director of the State Institution for the Deaf, Dumb and Blind.

McLean was also a close friend of Susan B. Anthony and was a friend and supporter of the women’s suffrage movement. He became a strong advocate for the inclusion of women on the faculty at the University of California.

Sarah Knox McLean’s family, the Hawleys, were said to have played a major role in the American Revolutionary War. During the Spanish-American War she was the vice-president of the Red Cross and later became an organizer of the Women’s Board of Missions of the Pacific.

The cross on the gravesite is known as the Maclean’s Cross and is a replica of one from Iona, Argyleshire. It is the oldest Christian relic in Scotland, assigned to the period of St. Columba.

Emily Fish & Juliet Nichols - Lighthouse Keepers

[Photo by Michael Colbruno]

Emily Fish (1844-1931) Plot 33,
Juliet Nichols (1859-1947) Plot 33,

Emily Fish and Juliet Nichols are remembered as the most celebrated “mother-daughter” lighthouse keepers in the United States. Actually, Juliet was the daughter of Emily’s late sister. When Emily Maitland was just seventeen, she and her widowed brother-in-law, Dr. Melancthon Fish, were married in China where he served as U. S. vice consul in Shanghai for six years, and Emily raised Juliet.

After their marriage, Dr. and Mrs. Fish and Juliet returned to the U.S. where he served for the Union in the Civil War, and Emily and Juliet accompanied him during General Sherman’s campaign through Georgia.

Juliet married Henry Nichols who became a naval officer and inspector in the Lighthouse Service’s 12th District. When Melancthon Fish died in 1893, Henry Nichols suggested to Emily the idea of her becoming the lighthouse keeper at Pt. Pinos on the Monterey Peninsula – a position that was about to become available. Emily won the appointment and in 1893 moved into the lighthouse along with a Chinese manservant named Que who had come from China with the family. From her home in Oakland she brought fine antique furniture, paintings, china, and silver. Determined to have a garden, with Que’s help she brought topsoil to the sandy grounds and planted grass, trees and hedges. Her 92-acre “estate” featured Holstein cows, thoroughbred horses, chickens and French poodles. Over the years she listed in her log more than thirty male workers, most of whom she noted she fired for incompetence. Emily Fish was an active member of Monterey society, entertaining widely, chairing local committees and helping to organize the Monterey-Pacific Grove American Red Cross.

After Henry Nichols died in the Spanish-American War in 1899 leaving Juliet without support, it was arranged for her to be the keeper of the light at Angel Island, a post she filled ably from 1903 to 1914. In the summer of 1906 Juliet gained fame when the automatic bell failed in heavy fog and she manually rang the bell twice every fifteen seconds for a period of 20 hours, 35 minutes. Earlier that year both women were at their posts when the April 18 earthquake struck; Emily’s lighthouse suffered some rather severe damage, while Juliet’s experience included watching the destruction by temblor and flame of San Francisco.

Both women retired in 1914. Emily spent the rest of her life in Pacific Grove, Juliet in Oakland.

[Some of this information came from the article “Women of the Light” by Jeremy D’Entremont published in The Lighthouse Digest, July 2004 - compiled by docent Barbara Smith]

Edson Adams - Wealthy Oakland Co-Founder; Hannah Jayne Adams - Oakland's First Teacher

[Photo by Michael Colbruno; picture of Hannah Jayne Adams from the Oakland Tribune]

Plot 46, Lot 94

Edson Adams (1824 - 1888) was born in Fairfield County, Connecticut and sailed for San Francisco in January, 1849. He arrived in July and headed straight for the mines. He spent several months in the gold fields and returned to San Francisco in March of 1850.

Adams was soon to become one of the richest men in the Bay Area. His success was in no small measure the immediate result of his affiliation with two ex-miners and attorneys, Horace Carpentier and Andrew Moon. The three me squatted, plotted, and incorporated the town of Oakland on land owned by the Peralta family, part of a Spanish land grant.

After an official dispute over the land, a compromise was reached, primarily engineered by Carpentier, by which the three obtained a lease from Peralta. Problems arose when Adams, Moon and Carpentier began selling portions of the “leased” land, and by late 1851 a surveyor had laid out the beginnings of the town of Oakland. Eventually, the courts ruled in favor of the Peraltas, but by then, it was too late, as the land had long before been sold and developed.

Adams first settled in a shack at the foot of Broadway (Main Street, then). The area he and his partners leased from Peralta ran from the bay to 14th Street and from Market Street to Lake Merritt. Oakland was incorporated as a town in 1852, and as a city in 1854. After a modest start, the new city became a popular residential community, particularly after Adams encouraged the development of ferry service to San Francisco. This was difficult because of the need to modify the natural sand bar at the estuary’s entrance, but eventually the establishment of ferry service allowed the burgeoning town to grow. In addition to pushing for ferries, Adams was a force in the setting aside of land for parks.

Edson Adams married Hannah Jayne, Oakland’s first school teacher, who had arrived in Oakland via mule across the Isthmus of Panama. Her schoolhouse was at the corner of Fifth & Clay and cost $1,000 to construct.

The Edson home, “The Place,” was located at Adams Point near the foot of Vernon Street. Their property at “Adams Point” totaled some 400 acres which they gradually sold off.

When Adams died in 1888, Adams Point was still largely undeveloped, although later many mansions dotted the area. It was after the 1906 earthquake that Adams’ descendants were moved to dispose of most of the family’s holdings in the area in response to the rapidly rising prices commanded by the demand of many San Francisco families relocating to the East Bay.

[Excerpted from materials by Mountain View docent Barbara Smith and Berkeley historian Alan Cohen]