Lone Mountain Cemetery, named after the towering sandhill just south of Geary Boulevard, opens for business and its first tenants take up lodging three days later. A year earlier, a group of San Franciscans, with profit in mind, had purchased fifty-four sandy acres bounded by today's Presidio Avenue, California Street, Geary Boulevard, and Parker Streets.

The venture is so successful that during the next decade, three other cemeteries are founded on the slopes adjacent to Lone Mountain: Odd Fellows, Masonic, and Calvary. The original Lone Mountain Cemetery changes its name to Laurel Hill Cemetery in 1867.

A century later, nothing will remain of all this: neither the builders of the West, nor the civic and military leaders, nor the jurists, nor the inventors, nor the artists, nor the eleven United States Senators.

Only the Columbarium San Francisco Landmark #209, which was in the Odd Fellows Cemetery, will survive. Only the Columbarium and a plaque half hidden by a hedge.

Tuesday, September 13, 1859

At sunrise on a farm near Lake Merced, the Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court shoots and kills a United States Senator.

Senator David C. Broderick and Supreme Court Justice David Terry, both members of the Democratic party, are on opposite sides of the great national debate. Senator Broderick, a stonemason's son, is a populist and an abolitionist. Justice Terry, a strapping Southerner who carries a Bowie knife, is associated with the ascendant Chivalry wing of the Democratic Party.

During the summer, Senator Broderick had been depressed by the direction of his party and his own declining political fortunes. He had even predicted his imminent death to friends. On the morning of June 26, he set this prophecy in motion at the International Hotel while reading a newspaper report of a speech made Justice Terry in which he called the Senator an abolitionist, disloyal to the Democratic Party. Senator Broderick threw the newspaper at a nearby friend of the Chief Justice calling Justice Terry a miserable wretch who was part of a miserable, corrupt Supreme Court. When Senator Broderick's outburst was relayed to Justice Terry, the Justice wrote the Senator, "I now take the earliest opportunity to require of you a retraction of those remarks."

Notes were exchanged until Justice Terry demanded satisfaction. Broderick accepted and presented articles for the duel: 5:30 AM Monday September 12 1859, a farm near Lake Merced, dueling pistols at ten paces.

By Monday, these articles were public knowledge. The State Constitution prohibited dueling. On the morning of the duel, the sheriff was waiting at the remote, sandy location and arrested both men. A judge released them on their own recognizance.

They meet again on Tuesday at the same spot along with their seconds and some seventy-five spectators. They remove their overcoats and their seconds toss the coins. Justice Terry wins the first toss and chooses his French dueling pistols as the weapons. Senator Broderick wins the second toss and chooses to stand with his back to the sun.

The count begins. The men raise their weapons. Senator Broderick's gun fires prematurely, the bullet lodges harmlessly in the earth. The count ends. Justice Terry fires, hitting the Senator in the chest and piercing a lung. The senator will die three days later at a Black Point home.

Edward Baker will eulogize the Senator at his funeral in Laurel Hill Cemetery and set in motion the transformation of the stonemason's son from a Democrat into a martyr of the Republican Party. Newspapers will denounce Justice Terry and Chivalry and call him murderer and assassin.

The following year Abraham Lincoln will carry California by 614 votes.

By the end of World War II, Laurel Hill had been subdivided for housing except for a parcel on Presidio Avenue between California and Bush Streets. The City planned to build a school here, but plans changed and The City sold the property to Fireman's Fund Insurance Company in 1953.

Fireman's Fund built an office complex in the popular International-Suburban-Office-Park school of architecture, sort of a Crown Zellerbach building taking a nap on the grass, and occupied it in 1957.

When Fireman's Fund fled for the suburbs in 1985, they left their building behind, and it was purchased by the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), one of the world's leading biomedical research and education institutions.