For Black History Month, we’re reprinting a story from the Glen Park Neighborhoods History Project by founder and director Evelyn Rose.
The revisionist, understated, or forgotten aspects of Black history makes research in this area particularly challenging. In research to date, the rediscovered histories of Glen Park and its neighboring districts in the American period have been predominantly linked with people of White European descent. Let us now begin to raise awareness about what we know so far about the events and people associated with Black history in Glen Park and surrounding districts, inclusive of both their allies and those who may have opposed equitable citizenship.
Founding of Fairmount
That Fairmount is now recognized as having been merged with Glen Park. This is likely due to a decision in the 1990s by the San Francisco Planning Department to establish 37 distinct neighborhoods. Approved by the Board of Supervisors, the order implemented neighborhood notification requirements to accommodate the city’s neighborhood organizations. Thirty years later, Fairmount is not widely known, even by some who live within its historic boundaries.
Yet, Fairmount is one of the oldest planned neighborhoods in San Francisco. It is likely the first with a plat laid out to follow the topography of the landscape rather than the traditional gridiron pattern. The foundation of its history rests in the transcontinental railway and men from Massachusetts who were staunch supporters of Abraham Lincoln – in fact, Richard Chenery led the California contingent in Lincoln’s inaugural parade in 1861. Moreover, the name Fairmount appears to have been derived from a speculative development of the same name just south of Boston that is now Hyde Park. Boston’s Fairmount was located immediately adjacent to Camp Meigs, the training site of San Francisco’s California Hundred, volunteer cavalrymen from across Northern California who fought as Company A in the Second Massachusetts Cavalry during the Civil War, and also of the 54th Massachusetts Colored Infantry, later featured in the movie, Glory.
Read more about the significant history of Fairmount in San Francisco. Learn more about the president of the Pacific Railroad Homestead Association (later renamed as the Fairmount Homestead) and namesake of Chenery Street, Richard Chenery, at our partner website Tramps of San Francisco.
Mary Ellen Pleasant
Mary Ellen Pleasant (~1814-1904), the mother of civil rights in California, in her later years. Image courtesy of the San Francisco Public Library.
The Glen Park Neighborhoods History Project (GPNHP) was the first to debunk the myth that Mary Ellen Pleasant once lived in the Poole-Bell Mansion near the corner of Laidley and Fairmount. She did, however, maintain a cottage on old San Jose Road near Geneva at the site of today’s Geneva Car Barn. However, while she never lived in Fairmount/Glen Park, we continue to honor her association with the district to further broadcast her legacy.
Pleasant was likely the first African American woman to become a millionaire through her investments with Thomas Bell (as the records documenting her wealth no longer exist, that honor has been attributed to Madame C. J. Walker). An abolitionist, Pleasant financially supported John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. She also aided the transport to San Francisco of formerly enslaved Black men and women and helped them find jobs and establish their own businesses. She purchased lots in neighboring Noe Valley near Church Street through realtor Joseph A. Comerford and either resold or leased them to African American women. Known as the mother of California civil rights, Pleasant assumed significant risk as she is said to have given shelter to Archy Lee during his legal fight against Charles Stovall. In her later years, as Jim Crow attitudes became more prominent in San Francisco, she was denigrated by the public and died destitute.
Read more about the legacy of Mary Ellen Pleasant. Also see the Glen Park Women Hall of Fame, page 2, in the pdf viewer.
Glen Park and the Mission Zoo
Realtor Archibald S. Baldwin of the agency Baldwin & Howell founded the Glen Park Company in 1897 with the sole purpose of running a zoological garden. This action is what gave Glen Park its name (see the Summer 2016 issue of the Glen Park News, page 8). Baldwin’s plan was to establish a 145-acre pleasure ground extending from Castro Street west into Glen Canyon, and from Martha Hill north to the 30th Street line. First opening in the fall of 1898, Glen Park and the Mission Zoo would attract thousands of people every weekend to see exciting aeronautic events, wild animals, vaudeville shows, and traipse along promenades through the landscape. It also appears to have been Baldwin’s mode of enticement for attracting potential homebuyers to view lots in his remote Glen Park Terrace that he would place up for auction in 1899.
Aspects of Glen Park and the Mission Zoo introduces some complicated histories. Among the several types of entertainment at the resort were minstrelsy and “black face comedy.” Cakewalks were another form of entertainment – winners of cakewalking contests were awarded pieces of cake. Originally developed by enslaved African Americans to mimic the stiff, waltzing dance of their owners, White entertainers preempted cakewalking to mock African American dance.
By 1902, Baldwin had sold off all his interests in Glen Park and the Mission Zoo. As described by Richard Brandi in his book, Garden Neighborhoods of San Francisco: The Development of Residence Parks, 1905-1924, Baldwin’s next project, Presidio Terrace, included a covenant in the deed that made Presidio Terrace and later, other residence parks West of Twin Peaks, exclusive for White residents only (the GPNHP is acknowledged in Brandi’s book for providing information about Baldwin’s experiences with Glen Park).
Read more about Glen Park and the Mission Zoo at our partner website, Tramps of San Francisco (a 6-part series; navigate to the next section at the end of every post).
Abby and Alexander Fisher
Alexander C. Fisher (1890), from “Democracy’s Colored Army: Sketches and Portraits of Some of the Leaders”, in the
San Francisco Examiner, Sep. 27, 1890, www.Newspapers.com. [An image of Mrs. Abby Fisher has yet to be located.]
Abby Fisher is recognized among culinary historians for authoring the first cookbook by a formerly enslaved African American. It was published in San Francisco by the Women’s Co-Operative Printing Office in 1881. GPNHP founder Evelyn Rose has been working to uncover the life histories of Mrs. Fisher and her husband, Alexander, both in Mobile, Alabama and in neighboring Noe Valley in San Francisco. Her ongoing research has revealed much more about the Fishers than previously known, including Alexander’s interactions with President Ulysses S. Grant and 2 mayors of San Francisco, and Mrs. Fisher’s interactions with some highly prominent patrons. The Fishers purchased their home in Noe Valley from the same realtor, Joseph A. Comerford, who had completed transactions with Mary Ellen Pleasant (see above).
Though details of the Fishers’ life histories are still being researched, you can download Rose’s publication summarizing results to date in Repast, a journal from the Culinary Historians of Ann Arbor (starting on page 10).
The Color Line of Woman’s Suffrage
In the years following the 1906 earthquake when the population of Glen Park was booming, women of the Glen Park Outdoor Art League were working hard to confirm a woman’s right to vote. Read more about Glen Park resident Johanna Pinther, her community leadership, and how she became a co-leader of the first official suffrage march for woman’s suffrage in August 1908 under the banner of the California Equal Suffrage Association (CESA). Also, read more about the backstory of woman’s suffrage in Glen Park, and see the pdf viewer in the Glen Park Woman Hall of Fame, pages 3-6.
Yet a few years earlier in 1902, a color line intended to exclude women of color from the General Federation of Women’s Clubs had been drawn across the United States. Mrs. Laura Lyon White, today regarded as the mother of California conservation and president of the California Club in San Francisco, was fiercely opposed to the inclusion of women of color. A prominent voice demanding inclusion was Mabel Craft Deering. A graduate of UC Berkeley, trained as an attorney, and known for being an “ardent feminist,” she also worked as the Sunday editor for the San Francisco Chronicle.
At the time of the first suffrage march, Deering had become a member of CESA. Founded in 1904 with Mrs. Mary Sperry as president and Mrs. Ellen Sargent as honorary president, CESA was composed of women who for many years had formerly been active with the California Club. While we may never know the position over the color line personally taken by Mrs. Pinther and other Glen Park women who were active in CESA, that CESA had welcomed Deering as a member and that Deering marched behind co-leader Pinther with other women of CESA and their male allies in the first official march for woman’s suffrage implies that CESA members supported inclusion and erasure of the color line.
Yet, one year later Mrs. Pinther would invite Mrs. Lovell White to Glen Park School to plant trees on Arbor Day. The Glen Park Outdoor Art League that Pinther had founded in 1908 was based on the model developed by the Mill Valley Outdoor Art Club that Mrs. White had cofounded. Also, Mrs. Pinther’s relatives lived in Mill Valley and she may have already been an acquaintance of Mrs. White.
While Mrs. Pinther may have supported inclusion of all women regardless of skin color in the fight for the right to vote, her invitation to Mrs. White to join the Glen Park Outdoor Art League for Arbor Day becomes a complicated matter. Whether it was solely in recognition of White’s work in conservation and for helping to establish California’s state park system while concurrently overlooking her stance about inclusion may never be known.