Historical Marker · No. 91
Telegraph Hill
San Francisco, San Francisco County · California
Erected by California Historical Society, 1961
The signal station's owners, Sweeny and Baugh, printed its code as a broadside so anyone in town could read the arms on the pole, and the town learned it. Both arms straight out meant a sidewheel steamer, the mail boat with letters from home. The story goes that when an actor in The Hunchback flung out his arms and asked what this meant, a voice from the audience answered, a sidewheel steamer. The bronze, cast twice for visits of the liner Canberra, spells indentified and obselete. No state plaque stands here.
What the plaque says
During Gold Rush days a look-out stationed in a structure on this spot observed and signalled the arrival of incoming vessels. By adjusting movable arms high on a tall pole and by hoisting national colors, he indentified the nature of the ship arriving and alerted the town below. After four years, in 1853, this novel signalling system became obselete through use of electrical telegraph. This monument erected by California Historical Society July 20, 1961, on the occasion of the arrival of "S.S.Canberra" of the P & O Steam Navigation Company Original plaque replaced by the Coit Tower Preservation Fund, and rededicated January 31, 1993 on the arrival of "S.S.Canberra", World Cruise 1993
Where it stands
37.80305, -122.40612 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Muir Beach Overlook — 11 miA cliff edge on Highway 1, and the concrete dugouts where two-man crews watched the sea after Pearl Harbor.
- Muir Woods National Monument — 11 miA redwood canyon saved from a reservoir by a gift, and named for a man who had been there once.
- Earthquake Trail — 27 miA short loop along the San Andreas, where a broken fence shows how far Point Reyes moved in under a minute in 1906.
- Kule Loklo — 27 miA Coast Miwok village built in the 1970s to honour a people its builders were told had died out. They had not.