Notable Figures

French-born explorer and naturalist Adelbert von Chamisso (full name: Louis Charles Adélaïde de Chamisso de Boncourt) (1781-1838) visited the San Francisco Bay area in the early nineteenth century. During his time in California, Chamisso studied a number of indigenous plant and animal species and his inventory is considered a valuable ecological record to this day.

Adolph Sutro was a German-born Jewish American. He was inventor, entrepreneur and real estate developer who helped shape the landscape of late 19th century San Francisco. Interested in providing inexpensive recreation for the general public, he changed San Francisco's sparse and undeveloped Point Lobos area into a flourishing recreational complex that during its heyday boasted the Cliff House, Sutro Baths and Sutro Heights.

Among the earliest non-indigenous residents of California were hundreds of people of African background who descended from enslaved peoples taken to Mexico during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These Afro-Latine shaped the character of California much as Puritans shaped the character of New England.

The “mother of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area,” Amy Meyer is a Bay Area conservationist who helped forge local and national support to preserve the land at the Golden Gate as a national park in the 1970s. She served on the founding board of the Presidio Trust and is currently convener of People for the Parks.

A Mexican-American pioneer, businesswoman, healer, and landowner, Doña Juana Briones de Miranda (1802-1889) lived in the San Francisco Bay area under the flags of three different nations. She was one of the first three settlers in Yerba Buena before it became San Francisco

Dr. Kazue Togasaki was one of the first Japanese American women to become a doctor in the United States. She was born and raised in San Francisco and delivered over 10,000 babies in her long career serving the community and Japanese Americans. A survivor of Japanese internment in WWII, she was strong willed, serving as a physician to fellow internees at the assembly centers from 1942 until her release in Fall 1943.

Marie Equi was born in 1872 in New Bedford. A homesteader in Oregon, Marie became a physician and activist. Equi was placed in charge of obstetrics at the United States Army General Hospital in the Presidio of San Francisco. She was subsequently decorated by the U.S. Army for her humanitarian efforts.

Fred Korematsu was a civil rights leader and pioneer. When the Army forced Japanese Americans into concentration camps during WWII, Fred Korematsu refused to comply with the orders. He was arrested and held in the Presidio Stockade until being sent to the camps. Fred Korematsu fought his conviction and internment with his case making it to the U.S. Supreme Court. Fred Korematsu spent his life fighting against discrimination in the United States.

During World War II, women signed up with the Army and Navy Nurse Corps for service in the Philippine Islands. Of the 99 nurses known to have served in or at Bataan, 22 escaped before the final fall of the Philippine Islands in 1942. The remaining 77, the largest group of women Prisoners of War in American history, were repatriated in 1945.

Robert Lipscomb was an African American federal penitentiary inmate. Labeled as a “race agitator” and “known homo,” he fought and organized for civil rights within the prison walls during the segregated 1950s.