Strong winds and shifting sands have uncovered an eerie reminder of San Francisco's past: discarded gravestones and broken tomb markers used decades ago to shore up the Ocean Beach seawall.

The tombstones became visible this week, including bits and pieces of marble and granite that once marked the final resting places of citizens long dead.

One of them is the nearly intact marble tombstone of Delia Presby Oliver, who died at the age of 26 on Apr. 9, 1890.

Her remains were removed and reburied when San Francisco authorities closed nearly all the city cemeteries and moved the bodies to Colma in the early 20th century - part of a move to make space for the growing city. Oliver's original tombstone and thousands like it were used as landfill or in other ways throughout San Francisco.

Some were used as breakwaters. Pieces of others were used to line the gutters of Haight-Ashbury's Buena Vista Park. Some gravestones were used to build the seawall along the Great Highway. Large tombs and crypts were dumped into San Francisco Bay.

'No mystery'

"There's a romance to it, but no mystery," said John Martini, a San Francisco historian and former National Park Service ranger who has studied what lies under the Ocean Beach sands. "They are part of San Francisco history."

Martini said strong winds often uncover all kinds of things, even the remains of shipwrecks. The timbers of the sailing ship King Philip, wrecked at Ocean Beach in the 19th century, reappeared a couple of years ago and then vanished again under the sand after a few weeks.

The gravestones are like that, Martini said.

"They turned up some years ago in about the same place. There was a big fuss, and then they were covered up again. How soon we forget."

Delia Presby Oliver's grave marker is a heavy, solid piece of stone meant to last an eternity. The tombstone, nearly as intact as the day it was carved more than 122 years ago, was uncovered in a drift of black sand near the end of Rivera Street.

She was a member of a prominent family. Her father, David Shattuck, was born in New England and served on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Her parents lived on Nob Hill.

Delia Presby was born in San Francisco in 1863 and married Frank B. Oliver on Oct. 27, 1885. She died less than five years later.

Newspapers did not report the cause of her death, but a notice in the San Francisco Call on April 10, 1890, said, "Friends and acquaintances are respectfully invited to attend the funeral services ... from the residence of her parents No. 814 Powell Street. Interment private."

It is not clear where Delia Oliver was buried, but it is likely that a person of her standing might be interred in the old Laurel Hill Cemetery, which extended south and west of California Street near what is now Presidio Avenue.

In the 1920s and '30s, the city decided to move the cemeteries out of the city. The Chinese, the Jewish, the Masonic and the Catholic cemeteries were destroyed.

Displaced by development

Laurel Hill was one of the last to go. In 1937, The Chronicle described it as "a silent city of the dead." There were 35,000 men, women and children buried there, all removed to make way for the Laurel Heights development.

Martini said much of the western part of the city was built atop old cemeteries, including shopping centers, housing developments and the campus of the University of San Francisco.

"They found hundreds of bodies when they did seismic work at the Palace of the Legion of Honor," he said. "It was pauper's cemetery. And there are literally hundreds of bodies under the Lincoln Park Golf Course. No one kept track of them all."

In established cemeteries, like Laurel Hill and Calvary on Geary Boulevard, "The remains of the loved one were removed at no cost," Martini said. "But if you wanted to remove a headstone, or a funerary building, the family had to pay the cost."

So tombstones left behind were recycled and used in various city projects. The Chronicle wrote about gravestones surfacing on Ocean Beach in spring 1977. Beachcombers were stunned.

Finding them was "the strangest stuff I've ever come across in a city that's weird enough," Gail Bills, who grew up in the Sunset District, told The Chronicle in a 1977 article about the tombstones.

The drifting sands soon covered them up again.

Fierce spring winds

This spring, the winds were particularly fierce, said Alexandra Picavet, spokeswoman for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which manages Ocean Beach. "This happens every once in a while," she said. "It's been a crazy year for sand."

Picavet said the Park Service has no plans to remove the gravestones. Eventually, they'll be covered again by the drifting sand, only to be rediscovered in a few more years.

‌