The Invasion As World War I war rages on, Philadelphia throws a spectacular parade to promote the latest “Liberty Loan” bonds. Some 200,000 patriotic citizens jam the downtown sidewalks – “packed in like sardines,” one commentator says – to  cheer two miles of marching bands, floats, and waves of uniformed troops. Within 72 hours of […]

By Terry Hamburg, Director of the Cypress Lawn Heritage Foundation Cypress Lawn has purchased Olivet Memorial Park, which includes a crematory and a funeral home. This acquisition will improve our delivery systems for services, cremations, and receptions; reduce annual irrigation costs;  and open up access to 8 additional acres of land for cemetery sales. Situated […]

James Clair Flood 1939-2020. A Tribute.     A member of the Cypress Lawn Cemetery Board of Directors for 31 years, “Jim” Flood passed away on February 22, 2020. He died as he lived. The avid outdoorsman suffered a heart attack after a day of downhill skiing near Jackson Hole, Wyoming. His passionate pursuit of duck hunting, […]

  2020 is the centennial of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that granted voting rights to women. “Suffragists” is not a misspelling. People are more likely to use the word “suffragettes” for those women (and men) who were advocates of female voting. The battle for woman’s suffrage was in full force in both Britain […]

  Called “Hallidie’s Folly,” Andrew Hallidie certainly had the last laugh…all the way up the hill and to the bank. San Francisco is built on a terrain of steep hills. In its early days the only way for people and materials to conquer those inclines was by horse. This kept many prominent locations sparsely inhabited […]

“Everything you knew about the 1906 earthquake was a lie or an inaccuracy. If you repeat a lie long enough, it becomes the truth.”  ~ James Dalessandro, San Francisco historian

  There are many people buried at Cypress Lawn who changed the world. Not the least is Charles Fey, who invented the slot machine. As a young man, he worked in France and London before emigrating at age twenty-three to New Jersey. Charles settled in San Francisco and started a company that produced and repaired  […]

It was not by chance that when Laurel Hill Cemetery in San Francisco was ordered in 1937 by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to remove all its burials and abandon the Cemetery, the Board of Directors petitioned Cypress Lawn to accept the remains. Both institutions were cut from the same historic garden cemetery cloth. […]

His body is here. His head (skull) sits at the Warren Anatomical Museum in Boston. Phineas Gage is perhaps the most famous neurological patient in modern history, one of the “great medical curiosities of all time” and a “living part of medical folklore.” Gage and his constant companion, the inscribed tamping iron sometime after 1849, seen in […]

  Widely served during the Gold Rush years and long thereafter, Pisco Punch was so potent that one writer of the day remarked that “it tastes like lemonade but comes back with the kick of a roped steer.” Others said “it makes a gnat fight an elephant.” Pisco is a late 16th century brandy made from Peruvian grapes […]