The big dig for San Francisco’s multi-billion transport terminal has unearthed artefacts from during and after the city’s heady Gold Rush days, including opium pipes from a Chinese laundry and a chipped chamber pot found in an outhouse.

...the items should give San Franciscans ‘pride and ownership’ of their city

The 70 artefacts have excited city archaeologists and residents pondering the ground beneath their feet.

“It’s not often that you get a chance to stop for a moment and have a window into what used to be,” said James Allan, an archaeologist with William Self Associates, the firm ensuring the items are unearthed and preserved.

The £2.5 billion Transbay Transit Centre being built in the South of Market financial district is billed as the “Grand Central Station of the West”. The million-square-metre bus and railway station will serve as the northern end of California’s planned high-speed rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The sleek and modern development stands on the same site once inhabited by working-class Irish immigrants and Chinese labourers who lived back to back on the sand dunes of the busy Gold Rush port known as Yerba Buena Cove.

They were the Donahues and the Dollivers, the Wings and the Lings, and the now-seemingly quaint accoutrements of their lives are being unearthed: clay opium pipes and ceramic teapots from China; French perfume bottles; dainty English serving dishes, apothecary jars and the heads of hand-painted porcelain dolls; as well as animal-bone toothbrushes and abandoned chamber pots.

They all date back to the mid-to-late 1880s, when the cove was reclaimed and clapboard houses went up on Mission, Natoma and Minna streets, between First and Beale.

They were filled with Irish, Swedish, German and Italian immigrants, as well as the Chinese who had come during the Gold Rush and then stayed on to help build the railways and bridges.

Today’s residents and workers can see the exhibit in the lobby of the building that houses the Transbay Joint Powers Authority.

“I live and work in the neighbourhood so I’ve been walking by the excavation site for a while and resisting the temptation to sneak in and see what might be lying around,” said Tom Pagel, an investment adviser.

“The neighbourhood has changed so much in a relatively short period of time. It’s a big evolution and gives you a glimpse into how the world has changed in those years.”

The artefacts are accompanied by historic photos and documents, including an 1885 article from the San Francisco Chronicle in which Irish landlords JS and Mary W. Dolliver were seeking $500 in damages from Ah Wing and 11 Chinese tenants for the “offensive smells from the laundry that have injured the rental value of the plaintiff’s premises”.

Today, Ming Ng is a Chinese engineer with a firm that hopes to work on bus storage for the new terminal. He had just held a meeting with Transbay officials upstairs and checked out the exhibit as he was leaving the building. “It’s very interesting to see the pottery compared to the metal things that are all rusted and ruined,” he said, looking at a pristine blue-and-white Chinese teapot, then pointing towards a rope pulley and iron chisel found in the back garden of a brick mason.

“The pottery looks almost new,” he said. “That’s the Chinese character for longevity.”

Mr Allan said the artefacts were not necessarily unique and that they expected to unearth hundreds more.

“What is unusual is that we were able to identify the people and occupations of the early Gold Rush,” he said.

“When the Gold Rush started in the 1850s, the miners came here and there was no place for them to live, so they lived in the sand dunes and then tent camps. We found the evidence: a wooden floor and a lot of bottles, barrels, a privy, leather shoes and boots.”

They would have worked in the Risdon Iron Works – which built pipes for Hawaiian plantations – the Selby Smelting Works, Miners Foundry or the San Francisco Gas and Light Co.

Mr Allan said his favourite find was an oblong, earthen storage jar found fully intact. The unglazed pot with a thin neck and bulbous belly was used to store grain, olives or water.

“It’s the equivalent of today’s plastic water bottle in that they were used, and used, and then thrown away,” he said.

He also liked a porcelain chamber pot found at the bottom of an outhouse. It might have been part of a toiletry set sold by Sears back then for $2.25.

Ellen Johnck, an archaeologist who came to see the exhibit, said the items should give San Franciscans “pride and ownership” of their city.

“To me, this lends more understanding and a greater appreciation for what it took to build this great city,” she said.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.