In the aftermath of the fire, the Daily Alta California reported that the “portion of the burned district which was built out into the bay and upon piles will have to be rebuilt in a very different manner. The piles generally are entirely ruined or so badly injured that they will not serve the purpose of foundations for houses. They cannot be replaced from the fact that there is not now sufficient water in that portion of the city to enable the pile driver to be used. It will therefore be necessary generally, to fill it up, and thus give future improvements the solid earth for a foundation.” Over the next few years, sand from the dunes that hemmed the harbor was loaded by steam shovels and sent rocketing into the shallows on rail-mounted dump cars, burying the old waterfront beneath 16 feet of fill.
In the summer of 1851, before the burned area was completely filled in, Charles Hare, a “ship breaker,” reportedly “broke up” the charred remains of General Harrison and sold them off “piecemeal.” After that, as a progression of buildings arose on the corner of Clay and Battery, the story of General Harrison gradually faded from people’s memory. In April 1906, the great earthquake and fire destroyed San Francisco and leveled the block. Rebuilding was slow, so it was not until 1912 that workers cleared the ruins and dug down into the sand to pour the foundations for a new building. Their steam shovels hit the buried remains of General Harrison, but no one remembered the ship’s name, and newspaper reports suggested the wreck was that of a Spanish ship lost on the old waterfront in 1849. The workers tried to chop away the thick timbers of the ship, but the venerable old hulk resisted their axes and saws. A few pilings were hammered through the ship to support the foundations of the new building, and General Harrison was reburied. By the mid-1990s, that rediscovery had also been forgotten, and no one was sure of what lay beneath the street and the buildings at Clay and Battery. But one archeologist suspected that General Harrison was still there.
Thanks to various laws, developers in San Francisco must conduct an archeological reconnaissance before any construction proceeds. In 1999, archeologist Allen Pastron began negotiations with the New York firm that was planning to build a new hotel at the corner of Clay and Battery streets. Pastron, a veteran of many digs in downtown San Francisco, believed that the remains of General Harrison were buried there. He used a powerful auger to bore a series of holes into the site. At one hole, the drill spit out a chunk of oak covered with copper. It was a section of the ship’s wooden keel, or backbone, still sheathed with the copper that once protected the hull from marine organisms.
Just how much of the ship had survived was unknown. In early September 2001, construction crews cleared away the concrete floor of the basement of the recently demolished building on the site and dug into the wet sand beneath it. Within a few hours, the outline of a ship began to emerge. About two thirds, or 81 feet of the 126-foot hull, was exposed. The other end of the ship lay beneath an adjacent building.
Pastron had uncovered the long-forgotten General Harrison. He needed a maritime archeologist to help with the project and phoned me. I flew out right away to “get my hands dirty” on the dig.
On September 9, I arrive at the site and am struck by how this small hole in the midst of all the high rises is a portal to the past. After a steep climb down a construction ladder, then a walk over loose sand and slippery mud, I reach the wreck. General Harrison burned down to her waterline, so only the bottom third of the ship’s once massive hull remains. The hold is largely empty, as it was cleaned out after the fire by salvager Charles Hare and his crew of local Chinese laborers. They pumped out the flooded lower part of the ship and mucked out the sodden, charred cargo. Hare’s crew, working in toxic, awful conditions after the fire, did more than clean out the ship. They also wrenched out hundreds of solid copper and brass fasteners that held together the timbers and peeled off the copper sheathing on the outside of the hull, which meant diving into the surrounding fetid shallows.
Inside General Harrison is more evidence of the Chinese ship breakers. A thick iron pry-bar for removing the thick copper bolts lies in one area. Nearby is a pile of iron bolts, stacked ready for removal. We find a broken rice bowl, a shattered bottle and several pairs of worn-out boots. It is as if the workers have just gone home. They left the job unfinished, though. The ship is only partially broken down — nearly every bit of valuable copper is gone, but the work stopped short of cutting apart the wooden hull. That might mean that the scrapping ended in October 1851, when newspapers reported that the work of filling in the shallows had at last reached the burned-out General Harrison. When carts began dumping sand just outside the hull, Hare’s crew simply dropped what they were doing and left. As I look at the half-cut planks, at sections of timber lying where laborers were chopping them up — the axe marks still fresh — and the discarded boots, bowl and bottle, I feel that I have truly stepped into the past.
Then time seemingly stops again, just before seven on the morning of September 11. As I walk to the site, my cell phone rings. It is my wife, Ann, at home in Vancouver, telling me that a jet has just crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. The crew gathers at the General Harrison dig, and down in our hole in the heart of San Francisco, we listen to a small radio as the terrible news comes in from back east. The second jet, the grounding of flights across the country and the rumors— we hear that the State Department has been hit, that the Capitol is in flames, that the White House has been evacuated, and that downtown San Francisco is also being evacuated. I look up at the Transamerica Pyramid and the towers of the nearby Embarcadero Center, and all this history beneath me seems insignificant, and the evidence of this long-ago disaster inconsequential. We are hustled off the site by security guards, and I make my way back to my hotel, with no place to go and nothing to do but wait as new history unfolds.
The next day, we return to work on General Harrison. Somber, and now stuck in San Francisco with no easy way to get home since all flights are grounded for an indefinite time, I turn to work and immerse myself in the past. It is cathartic and strangely reassuring. After all, we are exposing a layer of a once-devastated San Francisco that lies beneath yet another layer of destruction, atop which rests the modern city which now, on September 12, is beginning to reassert a semblance of normalcy. Life goes on, and the history we are exposing is a reminder of the great cycle of existence, not only for our crew but also for the crowds that again gather to watch. Local author Rebecca Solnit, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle a year after our dig, remarks that all those onlookers, “somehow drawn out of themselves in this place,” in a social climate where few people even make eye contact, nonetheless “feel part of something, and that the place was somehow enlarged — not only in its sense of time as the ship hull made visible the ruined city of 1851, but in its sense of community.”