GENERAL HARRISON Portrait ofa Gold Rush Storeship by Allen G. Pastron, PhD and Rebecca Percey The remains ofthe General Harrison emerge from under the streets of San Francisco.
T
he California Gold Rush unleashed a wave of social, economic and entrepreneurial energy that, seemingly over ni ght, transformed San Francisco from a sleepy hamlet into the largest American urban center west of the Mississippi River. Today, a century and a halflater, the physical traces of this historical phenomenon can still be found buried beneath the streets of the modern city. During the summer of 2001, a spectacular remnant of San Francisco's tumultuous past emerged from a construction site in the heart of the financial district, at the northwest corner of C lay and Battery streets. As workers prepared to lay the foundations of a new hotel , the rubble of several early-20th-century structures was cleared away, and archaeo logists labored feverishly to expose the charred hulk of the Gold Rush storeship General Harrison. T he sight of the impressive remains of a wooden sailing shi p co njured memories of San Francisco 's dramatic, often chaotic beginnin gs. It was a time when the city's burgeoning polyglot
population practically doubled every month, when the area that wo uld someday become the city's financial district still lay submerged beneath the shallow wa ters of Yerba Buena Cove, and when some of the city's best-known buildings were, in fact, the wooden hulls of the vessels that had, only a few months before, brought the "Argo nauts of '49 " to the California frontier.
A Decade Under Sail T he General Harrison was only ten years old and still in her prime when she arrived at San Francisco during the height of the Gold Rush in earl y 1850. She was co nstructed in 1840 on the banks of the Merrimack River in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Built entirely of white oak, the General Harrison was a copper-fastened, copper-sheathed, three-masted full-rigged ship with two decks, a square stern, and a billethead. As built, she displaced nea rl y 4 10 to ns and measured more than 126 feet in length with a 26-foot, 7-i nch beam and a 13-foot, 3 112 -inch dep th of hold. Archaeologists recover a crate fuLL of wine bottles, many of which are intact and stiff contain wine. (ALL photos courtesy Archeo-Tec, Inc.)
SEA HISTORY 102, AUTUMN 2002
29