- From an article printed in the San Francisco Chronicle dated April 26, 1986:
Archaeologist Allen Pastron announced the discovery of a major find of Gold Rush artifacts in San Francisco - in a canvas shack dating from 1849. The dwelling, discovered during preliminary excavations for a high-rise office building at First and Mission streets, has yielded about 75,000 items. It was a temporary shack, built of either tar paper or canvas and thrown up in the fall of 1849, when San Francisco was a wild boomtown and First Street was the edge of the bay. The area, then called Happy Valley, was a little hollow just south of Market Street and was the site of a tent city where people lived during the winter of 1849 while waiting to go to the gold fields. Pastron says "he is almost certain" the shack he dug up was a Gold Rush rarity - a family home. Most of the city's population of about 30,000 were single men who had come to make their fortunes in the Sierra foothills. Men outnumbered women 20 to 1. But Pastron thinks a married couple lived in the shack, based on the types of household goods - dishes, pins and scissors. "If it were a brothel there would have been more glasses and bottles," he said. There were only a few bottles - one of them once containing a quart of Gen. Taylor Whisky, distilled in Baltimore in the 1840s. "It is the rarest bottle I've ever found," Pastron said.
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