Cypress Lawn Funeral Home & Memorial Park, Colma

The inspiration for Cypress Lawn started with a carriage ride. Our founder, Hamden Holmes Noble, was riding past San Francisco’s Laurel Hill Cemetery, which had transitioned from a source of pride to an eyesore within a matter of years. San Francisco’s land-hungry residents were turning against cemeteries, and it was during this carriage ride when Noble’s friend urged him to create a solution to the problem.

In 1892, a group of civic-minded men led by Noble established Cypress Lawn a dozen miles south of San Francisco, a safe distance from the political reach of the city, which would later ban all burials, and then, in what was almost unthinkable, later passed a law “evicting” the dead from San Francisco. Because of this, over 35,000 people were later reinterred at Cypress Lawn.

Cypress Lawn Memorial Park, established by Hamden Holmes Noble in 1892, is a rural cemetery located in Colma, California, a place known as the “City of the Silent”. It is the final resting site for several members of the celebrated Hearst family plus other prominent citizens from the greater San Francisco area. The cemetery was among those profiled in the 2005 PBS documentary A Cemetery Special.~ Wikipedia