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The story of America’s broadening cultural and religious communities, perhaps most apparent on the Pacific Coast, is told in visual terms at Cypress Lawn.
Today, Cypress Lawn’s staff is enriched by a variety of cultural backgrounds and is a dynamic demonstration of what makes our country’s “melting pot” of cultures so beautiful.
The inspiration for Cypress Lawn started with a carriage ride. Our founder, Hamden Holmes Noble, was riding past San Francisco’s Laurel Hill Cemetery, which had transitioned from a source of pride to an eyesore within a matter of years. San Francisco’s land-hungry residents were turning against cemeteries, and it was during this carriage ride when Noble’s friend urged him to create a solution to the problem.
In 1892, a group of civic-minded men led by Noble established Cypress Lawn a dozen miles south of San Francisco, a safe distance from the political reach of the city, which would later ban all burials, and then, in what was almost unthinkable, later passed a law “evicting” the dead from San Francisco. Because of this, over 35,000 people were later reinterred at Cypress Lawn.
Noble traveled to research cemetery styles and discovered the rural and lawn park cemeteries along the East Coast. What later emerged at Cypress Lawn was 150 acres adorned by carefully selected horticulture to create a beautiful and serene garden. Today, our grounds also include a majestic internationally certified arboretum.
Cypress Lawn became — and still is — the final resting place for many prominent and powerful families across San Francisco and California. Over the years, magnificent monuments and edifices were built to memorialize the achievements of the men and women who shaped the history of the Golden State. These works of art were built by the leading architects, sculptors, and stained-glass craftsmen of the early 20th century.
Cypress Lawn has always been built upon the strength of our community. Noble was surrounded and supported by a dedicated Board of Directors and Board of Trustees, with each man bringing different life experiences and expertise to the table.
Notable members included: Charles Felton, co-founder of the oil company that became Chevron and also a member of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives; Irving Scott, a partner in the Union Iron Works, who designed Comstock Lode mining machinery, built battleships, and was a regent of the University of California and a trustee for Stanford University; George W. McNear, who owned large-scale wheat interests, and whose import-export business increased shipping to and from San Francisco; and John Taylor, who manufactured mining and mill machinery, chemicals, chemical supplies, and many others.
Over the course of Cypress Lawn’s first century, these significant names in California’s history became connected to our Memorial Park in an intimate way, investing not only their efforts but also their hearts, money, and time. This group of men powerfully affected the direction of Cypress Lawn and all shared in the responsibility for its success.
Fast forward to today, and all of us still care passionately about maintaining and preserving this Bay Area treasure for the next century — and beyond. The Cypress Lawn Heritage Foundation was created to promote educational and cultural activities and to encourage the preservation and restoration of the incomparable, art, architecture, and arboretum located at Cypress Lawn. You can support this endeavor by becoming a member of the Cypress Lawn Heritage Foundation.
In 1892, when Laurel Hill Cemetery (formerly Lone Mountain Cemetery) was forced out of San Francisco, the thirty five thousand (35,000) buried at Laurel Hill were moved to Cypress Lawn and in doing so San Francisco relinquished a part of its own history. Those buried at Laurel Hill during the second half of the nineteenth century, beginning in 1854, were true pioneers of the early West and although some had been moved individually by their families earlier, most were ultimately buried in vaults under a grass-covered mound that bears a memorial to their achievements. Removal of San Francisco's Laurel Hill Cemetery remains begins in 1939.
Burials can researched at the Genealogy Link, page top, at cypresslawn.com. Cremations that were not interred there are included.
1370 El Camino Real
Colma, San Mateo County, California
Cypress Lawn Memorial Park, established by Hamden Holmes Noble in 1892, is a rural cemetery located in Colma, California, a place known as the "City of the Silent".
Noble was a Civil War veteran who moved to California in 1865 and was a member of the San Francisco Stock Exchange prior to founding Cypress Lawn. On March 9, 1892, Noble was granted a permit to establish a non-sectarian cemetery and plans for Cypress Lawn were made public as work had begun on a mortuary chapel and receiving vault. Noble was responsible for the initial layout and landscape architecture of the cemetery.
The prominent castle-like granite entry gate east of El Camino was designed by the B. McDougall architecture firm in San Francisco in 1892, incorporating Mission Revival elements, and completed in 1893. The site was dedicated on May 28, 1893. A crematory also was completed in 1893, housed in a building designed by Albert Pissis and William P. Moore; it was damaged beyond repair during the 1957 San Francisco earthquake and subsequently demolished.
The idea of rural or garden cemeteries (as opposed to city cemeteries) became popular in the mid 19th-century in the United States following the founding of Mount Auburn Cemetery, and cities like San Francisco began relocating their badly maintained urban cemeteries to suburban settings. Between February 1940 until 1945, many of the remains from the Lone Mountain Cemetery complex in San Francisco had been moved to Cypress Lawn Memorial Park and were placed in a mound. In 1993, a memorial obelisk was added to the grassy mound to commemorate those that had been re-interred.
The cemetery was among those profiled in the PBS documentary A Cemetery Special (2005) by Rick Sebak.
The original cemetery occupies 47 acres east of El Camino Real and west of Hillside Boulevard and is known as the East Campus; the site was expanded by 101 acres west of El Camino, acquired in 1901, named the West Campus. Lakes were added in the 1920s. In 2006, Cypress Lawn opened the 45-acre Hillside Gardens, northeast of the original campus. The Mount Olivet cemetery, founded in 1896 on 65 acres adjacent to Hillside Gardens, was acquired by Cypress Lawn in 2020 and renamed Olivet Gardens.
Several structures are on the original (East Campus) site, including the 1892 entrance gate, the Noble Chapel and Crematory, named for the founder and completed in 1894, and the original columbarium, completed in 1895 to a design by Edward Hatherton and T. Paterson Ross. The Lakeside Columbarium, also on the East Campus, was designed by Bernard J. S. Cahill and started in 1927, but construction was suspended in 1930 due to the Great Depression and never resumed. On the West Campus, both the Public Mausoleum and Catacombs (completed 1921) and the Administration Building (1919) were also designed by Cahill.
Cypress Lawn Memorial Park is the final resting site for several members of the celebrated Hearst family, people from the California Gold Rush, plus other prominent citizens from the city of San Francisco and nearby surroundings. By 1992, more than 300,000 had been interred at the site.
Three British Commonwealth service personnel of World War I were buried here, but only one, Lieutenant Norman Travers Simpkin (died 1919), Royal Field Artillery, has a marked grave in the cemetery. Two others, Canadian Army soldiers, are alternatively commemorated on a special memorial in Greenlawn Memorial Park in Colma.