FoundSF

Historical Essay

by Beth Winegarner, 2025

This 1925 photograph shows the old Magdalen Asylum on Potrero Avenue and Twenty-second Street—now within the SF General Hospital campus—years after its name was changed to St. Catherine’s Home.

Photo: Online Archive of California

Did San Francisco’s Magdalen Asylum leave behind a mass grave?

In Ireland, Catholic institutions called Magdalene Asylums, which imprisoned women and girls in the name of moral reform, have attracted attention in recent years when mass graves were discovered on the grounds of some institutions. Once I discovered that San Francisco had its own Magdalen Asylum from 1856 to 1931, I found myself wondering whether it, too, had left buried secrets behind.

In 1854, a group of Irish nuns from the Sisters of Mercy arrived in San Francisco with the aim of bringing their mission of service, community and social justice to the new city. They purchased San Francisco’s original county hospital in 1855 (then on Stockton Street) and ran it for a short time, then founded St. Mary’s Hospital soon after.

In 1856, they opened a Magdalen Asylum (No word on how they lost the final “e”), named after the apostle Mary Magdalene, hoping to help sex workers escape the brothels and pursue more morally upstanding lives. Census records show that these first “Magdalens” were housed within St. Mary’s.

In the late 1860s, the Sisters opened a dedicated asylum near today’s 21st Street and Potrero Avenue, at the north end of the City and County Hospital campus (now Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital). By this time they had expanded, taking in teen girls who’d been sentenced to juvenile prison for crimes such as vagrancy and petty theft. They also housed unmarried pregnant women and girls.

San Francisco Chronicle, December 20, 1898.

By 1870, a few years after the building opened, the San Francisco Magdalen Asylum housed 78 women and girls. In 1880, that number more than doubled, to 185. The institution continued to hold about 150 to 200 until the city bought the building in the early 1930s.

San Francisco Call, April 12, 1895.

Dozens, if not hundreds, of infants were born to the inmates. They remained in the asylum until they went into labor, then typically went to St. Mary’s to deliver their babies and undergo a period of “confinement,” or rest and recovery after giving birth.

While these women and girls often returned to the Magdalen Asylum after confinement, their babies were often adopted out to other families. The nuns’ ledgers are brief, but suggest that adoptions were often arranged by the nuns or local priests affiliated with the Magdalen Asylum: “Infant adopted by a lady recommended by Father Peter;” “Her eldest boy sent to Orphan Asylum, the second adopted by Mrs. Kelly, Sacramento, and the baby by a lady here.”

Other infants were sent directly to the Orphan Asylum, otherwise known as the Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum or Mount St. Joseph’s Orphan Asylum. Run by the Daughters of Charity, Mount St. Joseph’s was located for much of its life on Newhall Street in the Silver Terrace area, once part of South San Francisco, now in San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood.

I first learned about San Francisco’s Magdalen Asylum while conducting research for my book, “San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries: A Buried History.” A map of the city’s early cemeteries showed a graveyard called St. Michael’s near 21st and Potrero. As it turned out, this was the Magdalen Asylum’s private burial ground, used for nuns and other religious workers who lived in and ran the institution.

When I learned about this place, I was already aware that some of the Irish asylums—often called Laundries because their inmates were forced to labor in their in-house industrial laundry facilities—had buried inmates and/or their children in mass graves that were only discovered decades later.

In 2003, after the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity sold a Magdalene Laundry site in north Dublin, Ireland, to a property developer, 155 bodies in an on-site burial plot were excavated. At first, only 133 bodies were known and, of those, only 75 of the deaths had been registered. Another 22 were found during excavation.

Another Irish Laundry in the town of Tuam seemingly placed the remains of 800 infants and toddlers in a septic tank on site. Many of the births or deaths were never registered with the government. Though Irish officials have known about the burials for many years, excavation of those remains only began in July 2025.

I reached out to the national Sisters of Mercy archive in Belmont, North Carolina, and was pleasantly surprised that they had records from the San Francisco site, and were willing to share what they had. One ledger logged inmates from 1856 to 1872, and another from 1904 to 1916; obviously, that leaves a gap of many years. Burials in St. Michael’s Cemetery and subsequent exhumations in the 1930s were also carefully recorded.

In all my research, I was only able to find one outlier in the Magdalen Asylum graveyard: An indigenous 12-year-old named Hannah who died in the institution on March 10, 1872, of tuberculosis. According to San Francisco death records, she was buried in St. Michael’s Cemetery.

The City of San Francisco purchased the site in 1931 to expand the San Francisco General Hospital campus. The Magdalen Asylum (by then it was known as St. Catherine’s Home) was forced to shut down — and exhume the graves in St. Michael’s Cemetery. The exhumation records don’t include Hannah, unless she’s designated by another name.

In 1932, San Francisco opened a “psychopathic” and maternity hospital within the St. Catherine’s buildings. Reusing the existing buildings reduces the likelihood that there was much, if any, excavation of the site that might lead to the discovery of hidden graves. And In 1992, San Francisco General Hospital constructed its current Behavioral Health Center on the former Magdalen Asylum site. Archaeological records from that construction don’t report finding any evidence of graves or human remains.

I was in many ways relieved to discover that most of the Magdalen Asylum dead were accounted for. But there was another avenue yet to explore.

Apparently, Mount St. Joseph’s, the Catholic orphanage that took in many infants and children of Magdalen Asylum inmates, had a reputation for high rates of infant mortality. Though, to be fair, infant mortality was high everywhere: Among whites in the 19th Century, it was somewhere between 60 to 110 deaths per 1,000 births.

Text reads: "This poor infant is the fruit of sin but the mother a good up to this fall a respectable servant could not be induced to allow it to be sent to Mount St. Joseph hearing that so many infants die in that establishment so with the Archbishop's permission it was taken here. The mother was shielded from exposure at the Sisters Hospital so that not one of her relations knew of her fall. Died July 29, 1869."

Magdalen Asylum register entry for Mary Donohoe.

Mary Donohoe, a 3-month-old, was admitted to the San Francisco Magdalen Asylum in May 1869 because her mother “could not be induced to allow it to be sent to Mount St. Joseph, hearing that so many infants die in that establishment,” according to the inmate registers. That same month, 25-year-old Minnie Myler stayed in the Magdalen Asylum during her pregnancy. Her infant was sent to Mount St. Joseph’s, where it soon died, according to the ledgers.

A Sister with today’s Daughters of Charity agreed to go through the infant admittance ledgers for the orphanage to see if any of the infants born at the Magdalen Asylum could be located within them. She also looked for any information on the deaths of those infants, or any others in their care in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Unfortunately, none of it matched up. It doesn’t help that their ledger began in 1873, the year after the Magdalen Asylum’s ended. And, although many infant and child deaths were recorded at Mount St. Joseph’s, they were “probably not more than the rate of infant mortality for society at that time,” she wrote to me. No causes of death or burial details were noted, and there was no indication of on-site burials.

She believed that these children probably were buried in a communal grave—but at the local Catholic Cemetery, which at that point was Calvary Cemetery near Lone Mountain, not on the orphanage property. These graves would have been moved to Colma’s Holy Cross Cemetery, along with the rest of the Calvary graves, in the late 1930s.

The Mount St. Joseph orphan asylum closed in 1977, and was redeveloped in the following decades, becoming the Silverview Terrace neighborhood that remains on the site today. I asked city planners whether there was any evidence of burials on the site that would have been discovered during redevelopment. Fortunately, there wasn’t.

For all its cruelty—and San Francisco Magdalen Asylum, like its Irish counterparts, was a cruel place—I suppose I was relieved to discover that the institution didn’t try to hide the deaths of inmates or their children. Those under the nuns’ control received more care and respect in death than they did in life.

Note:

For more about the San Francisco Magdalen Asylum, read this Mission Local article or explore Beth's Names Project.