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By Root 820 0

General Harrison and Niantic. San Francisco had burned several times during the gold rush, but the worst disaster was the fire of May 4, 1851. The blaze began on the west side of Portsmouth Square just after u p.m. on May 3 and spread throughout the city. By early morning, the fire was still burning: “We do not know how great is the destruction, for the smoke is so dense and the fire intervening, it is impossible to tell.” When the smoke cleared, San Francisco had lost nearly two thousand buildings, a number of lives and $7 million in destroyed property and merchandise. Among the losses were Niantic, General Harrison and another store ship, Apollo.

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.

UNEARTHING A FORGOTTEN SHIP

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.

The hull of General Harrison buried in the heart of San Francisco. James P. Delgado

Pastron had uncovered the long-forgotten General Harrison. He needed a maritime archeologist to help with the project and phoned me. I flew