The following contemporary account of the little schoolhouse in Portsmouth Plaza was written by Charles P. Kimball in 1853 for the San Francisco Directory:

In April 1847, the number of inhabitants exclusive of Indians, was 375. Eight months afterwards, when a census was taken by the Board of School Trustees, the number exceeded 800. Of these there were adult males, 473; adult females, 177; children of age proper to attend school, 60. This increase of more than an hundred per cent, in eight months, took place some months before the discovery of gold, and when California was sought merely for agricultural and commercial purposes.

As early as January 1847, a complaint was published in the California Star that there was no school for children, the writer stating that he had counted forty children playing in the street. A public meeting was then called, to adopt measures to found a school. But the project failed. Some months later it was revived, with better success. A school house was built, and completed by the 1st of December....

The first American school in California was duly opened on Monday, the 3d day of April, 1848....

This first American school on the Pacific coast south of Oregon, though founded apparently on a basis so safe and economical, had a short lived existence. In less than a year the gold excitement was to sweep over the country like a whirlwind, and for a season to crush everything like intellectual and moral culture, substituting the one all-absorbing passion for the accumulation of wealth.

Points of historical interest associated with Portsmouth Plaza and Gold Rush San Francisco:

• California Star Newspaper Site
• Clay Street Hill Railroad Site
• First American Flag Raised in San Francisco
• First Public School in California
• First United States Branch Mint
• Jackson Square Historic District
• Jenny Lind Theatre and San Francisco City Hall Site
• Montgomery Block Site
• Pony Express Site
• Portsmouth Plaza
• Robert Louis Stevenson Remembrance