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The history of San Francisco’s Lake Merced from 1830-1870.
San Francisco s Lake Merced: Rancho Days
by Woody LaBounty
(Published in Outside Lands magazine with support from the Schwemm Family Foundation.)
Since the 1850s, Lake Merced and the land around it have been the site of roadhouses, a famous duel, truck farms, and large scale city within a city housing developments. Located in the southwestern corner of the City and County of San Francisco, the lake has been used as a source for the city s water supply and for recreational activities from skeet shooting to golf to dragon boat racing. Despite encroaching urbanization, watershed changes, fragmentation, and aquifer reduction during the twentieth century, the lake remains a unique habitat supporting riparian, dune scrub, and woodland forest natural communities. Read part one.