El Polin Spring, Presidio, San Francisco

Juana Briones (1802-1889), founding mother of San Francisco, moved to El Polin Spring (Manantial El Polin) in the San Francisco Presidio with her father and siblings when her mother died. She was 11.

In 1775-76, her mother's parents had traveled with the De Anza colonization party from Tubac, New Spain (now in Arizona), to Branciforte, near the Mission Santa Cruz. Juana's grandmother was a native of Mexico. Her grandfather was a soldier of the Spanish Crown. At Branciforte, Juana's grandmother, mother, and later Juana practiced botanical medicine, including midwifery. Native curanderas healers, extraordinary though their powers seem to us today, were a normal, vital part of the community.

Juana's father was a Mexican soldier. At the Presidio, an outpost of the Mexican army on the foggy, windy southern headland of the Golden Gate, Her family lived near El Polin Spring, in a hollow facing east, overlooking the great bay and its sunrises.

Yerba buena (Clinopodium douglasii or Satureja douglasii), a minty medicinal plant, grows near El Polin Spring. The original name of San Francisco, Yerba Buena, derived, it is said, from the healing tea and other medicines that Juana used in her ministry as a curandera. At that time, the future city was a muddy, inhospitable maritime trading post with a few ramshackle huts plopped helter-skelter amidst the hilly coastal chapparal. Juana would have seen brigs, schooners, and barks sail through the Golden Gate and past her family's El Polin home as the ships headed for the small anchorage at today's Aquatic Cove.

Juana's time at El Polin formed the foundation of the powers she used to break out of the bigoted, oppressive patriarchy of white European and American mercenaries and colonists. The spring itself gave year-round life to humans, other creatures, and plants during the half-year of drought normal to the San Francisco bay lands. At El Polin, she would have honed her observational skills, finding valuable edibles and medicines among the riot of growth in the hollow of the spring and among the coastal scrub running down to the mudflats of the bay.

Researchers' rendering of adobe house at El Polin Spring, Presidio

This foundation of an adobe house may have been where the Briones family lived at El Polin Spring.