Mount Sutro - History

History

Much of today's Mount Sutro was part of a large tract of ranch land, a Mexican Land Grant - given originally to Jose de Jesus Noe in 1846 - officially called Rancho San Miguel. The property was acquired by Adolph Sutro shortly after he was bought out of his Comstock Lode stock by his "partners" (the so-called Silver Big 4) in 1879.

The newly gotten cash enabled Sutro to invest in San Francisco real estate on a grand scale, and at one time he owned almost 10% of San Francisco's acreage. Sutro used annual Arbor Day celebrations to plant trees (eventually thousands of them) on the relatively bare slopes, hollows or sand dunes of his properties.

Sutro named one of his planned developments "Mount Parnassus". This area was eventually renamed in honor of Sutro who was the 24th mayor of San Francisco and whose property this once was. Sutro originally planned to develop residential neighborhoods on this hill and another to the east which he named Mount Olympus.

In July 1895, Sutro donated a 13-acre (5.3 ha) site on the "Parnassus bench" overlooking Golden Gate Park, to serve as a campus site for the Affiliated Colleges of the University of California – now the University of California, San Francisco. Unfortunately, Adolph Sutro died land rich and cash poor in 1898 and, as a result, the settlement of his estate was long and arduous. Some plans of the Sutro Development Company – which operated a street railway to serve Sutro's development properties – were revised and others were stalled for years.

Though planned as a recreational forest, some parts of the forest were logged by Sutro's heirs. In 1934, after a fire, this effort was discontinued. The forest was logged once again during the rationing days of Second World War for use as domestic fuel.

With the settlement of the estate, after almost twenty years of litigation, much of the real estate that was Sutro's forest legacy began to be cleared – beginning about 1930, and ending by 1970 – as the city expanded westward and the land was put to urban uses.

Most of the forest standing today was purchased by the University of California in the early 1950s. In 2009, UCSF applied for a grant from FEMA to fell a majority of the trees on 23% of its acreage, in the name of fire safety. However, some locals suspected that its main impetus was from a group of native plant supporters who wished to remove the non-native eucalyptus in favor of native plants.

There was opposition to plan by local residents. In February 2010, UCSF announced it was withdrawing its application to FEMA, and would instead conduct a full Environmental Impact Review under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) before proceeding with plans to convert the ecology of the forest.