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dishing out life through the lens… it tells all

:: Financial District Buried Ships ::

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what?! wait! where’s the ship pics!?

[sorry no ship pics – just some historical nuggets]

this is just a glimpse of the many buried ships that have been found or are speculating to be located in San Francisco’s Financial District, Embarcadero, and even Levi’s Plaza (which was uncovered in 1978 and still lies beneath the plaza). Click here for a map showing location of some 47 ships in the downtown – waterfront area, where the original shoreline was at First and Market Street and even all the way over at Sansome and California.

here in this first picture, albeit an “any-corner-USA” shot, we look at the location where if we go 35 feet underground the remains of Othello would be found. She measured at 200′ feet long when she was unearthed in 1994 while construction of a tunnel was taking place.  Historians documented an 18-foot high section of a wooden hull that was sheathed in copper. Of course once they gathered as much information as possible they just bored right through her. This discovery places it right near the start of where the Mission Street wharf was once located.

Next,  at this intersection lies below the remains of the passenger-cargo ships, the Trescott and also the ship Byron.  Here you can find a listing of passengers that left the East Coast, on board the Trescott, bound for San Francisco in 1849.  Additionally for the Trescott we find that a William Lord Stevens wrote a journal of his voyage on the Trescott also in 1849. I am speculating that perhaps he was on board that listing in the first link of this paragraph — after all it does say “16 others not listed” on the passenger roll call. just a theory.

you can actually view that logbook – albeit sorta hard to read and written entirely in verse – by clicking here.

1849 was undoubtedly a busy year for the San Francisco harbor — during this year alone over 800 ships arrived at the ports carrying some 40,000 passengers

i could not find any info on the ship Byron other than what was located at the SF Genealogy site

Written by kapshure

March 8, 2009 at 4:01 pm

Posted in San Francisco

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