In the end, more than 150,000 bodies were moved from San Francisco to Colma, where farmland was turned to graveyards, the fertile soil now mostly covered in green, carpetlike grass. The number of people who die in San Francisco and spend eternity in Colma grows every day.

“All the cemeteries you go through here, they’re a history of San Francisco and of California,” said Richard Rochetta, a Colma Historical Society board member whose father emigrated from Italy and spent 30 years as a caretaker at Olivet Memorial Park.

In Colma, there are governors, mayors and senators. There are tycoons, archbishops and Civil War generals. There are architects, activists and artists. There are men once known as the Rice King, the Cattle King, the Fish King, the Beef King and the Potato King. There are Alcatraz inmates, city socialites and Phineas Gage, who was cutting a railroad bed in 1848 and somehow survived when explosive powder detonated and a 43-inch tamping iron was sent through his cheek, brain and skull before landing dozens of feet away. (His body is in Colma; his head and tamping iron are at Harvard Medical School.)

Levi Strauss is at Home of Peace, next to Hills of Eternity, where Wyatt Earp can be found. Joe DiMaggio is at Holy Cross, where his dark marble headstone this week propped up a couple of bats and two baseballs left there by fans.

A few feet behind DiMaggio is a crypt for Michael Henry de Young, founder of The San Francisco Chronicle, whose family name adorns the city’s major art museum.

Near the entrance to Holy Cross is a slate-black rectangular stone for Edmund G. Brown, the former California governor and father of the current one. Near the back is a small pink stone nestled in the grass for Moscone (“We love you Dad”), the San Francisco mayor assassinated along with the gay-rights activist Harvey Milk in 1978.