By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO, Calif.— When operators of the Presidio Golf Course started building a driving range last year, an old bottle on top of what appeared to have been a filled-in well was uncovered. A passerby sensitive to the importance of archaeology notified Myra Hermann, a senior environmental planner with the City of San Diego's Development Services Department.  

Construction was stopped and arrangements were made promptly to have an archaeological survey done by the firm of  Mooney Jones & Stokes of the site located between the old Spanish Presidio and what today is known as Old Town San Diego State Historic Park. 

Stacey C. Jordan-Connor,  Mooney Jones & Stokes director of cultural resources, said a metal button with a simple Star of David design was among the artifacts recovered from a 35-foot long, 4-foot wide trench that was cut down to the level of disturbance during a four-day-dig.

Although today part of an 18-hole pitch and putt golf course, the land that was excavated by the archaeologists formerly featured a corral and stable owned by Prussian-born partners Joseph S. Mannasse and Marcus Schiller, two19th century Jewish entrepreneurs who also were important historical figures in San Diego.

Mannasse immigrated via San Francisco to San Diego in 1853 in the company of his brother, Heyman, and cousin, Moses. Schiller arrived in San Francisco about the same time that the Mannasses were leaving that city.  Schiller migrated to San Diego in 1856, becoming partners with Mannasse in a general store located across what today is Juan Street from the subject property.

During the 1860s, Schiller became a grand master of the San Diego Masonic Lodge, and like his partner, served on the Board of Trustees of the City of San Diego.  Mannasse, in fact, was on the Board that cleared the way for a large tract of land to be set aside for a city park; Schiller, replacing his partner on the board the following year, formally voted to create the park. Many years later the large city park would become known as Balboa Park.  Schiller also was active in the affairs of San Diego's small Jewish community, becoming the first president of Temple Beth Israel, which opened its doors for High Holiday services in 1889.  

As a matter of coincidence, the Temple Beth Israel building where Schiller presided now is located just a few blocks up Juan Street in Heritage Park.  The building's original location was at 2nd and Beech Street, closer to downtown San Diego,  but it was relocated and restored nearly a century later thanks to the efforts of philanthropist Jim Milch, the Save Our Heritage Organization, and the County of San Diego, operator of the Heritage Park.

Together Mannasse & Schiller laid out a real estate development  known as the Mannasse & Schiller Addition, located between Old Town San Diego and Roseville, a town site created on San Diego Bay by San Diego's original Jewish settler, Louis Rose.  Mannasse & Schiller's real estate speculations also prompted them to purchase ranch land covering the coastal area of San Diego County now occupied by the City of Encinitas.

There is no way of knowing whether the Star of David button found during the 2005 archaeological dig belonged to either of the partners, as there were other Jewish merchants and family members who lived in San Diego during the 19th century who might have visited Mannasse & Schiller's corral and stable.

Other interesting buttons also were found at the site, including some from military uniforms.  Four of these buttons bear a relief image of the mythical Phoenix bird and an encircling model in French, je renais de me cendres (I am reborn from my ashes.)

In a recent interview at the golf course, Dr. Jordan-Connor said team members recognized from published materials the Phoenix buttons as having been made in England for the troops of self-proclaimed King Henri Christophe of Haiti, who reigned over the former French colony from 1811-1820. These buttons may have reached San Diego in the complex web of international trade—and, one might speculate,  so too could the little Star of David button reached the Mannasse & Schiller corral site serendipitously.  

The Presidio Golf Course is adjoined by the tiny Casa de Carrillo, which was built in 1821 and is considered the oldest standing structure in San Diego. The property is associated with one of San Diego's best-known love stories. Josefa Carrillo, forbidden to marry Yankee sea captain Henry Delano Fitch by the jealous Mexican Gov. Jose Maria Echeandia, ran one night in 1829  from her adobe home to the  nearby Pear Garden, where her friend Pio Pico—a future Mexican governor of California—waited with two horses.  Together, they rode to San Diego Bay, where Josefa met  Henry and the couple boarded a ship and sailed off together for marriage in Chile.

The land had a succession of owners between the time it was owned by Mannasse & Schiller and 1931, when it was purchased by George Marston, an influential lover of history who also constructed the Serra Museum atop nearby Presidio Hill.  

Wanting to keep the land between the Presidio and Old Town in open space, he hired William P. Bell to lay out a par-3, 18-hole golf course.  Bell already was renowned as the designer of golf courses in Balboa Park and at the La Jolla Country Club, as well as at the Bel Air Country Club in Los Angeles and on the Wrigley-family-owned Catalina Island.  Later in his career, he would lay out the golf course at Tilden Park in Berkeley, and design a course at Torrey Pines, which was completed by his son, William F. Bell.

Jordan-Connor said that most of the material found in the trench can  be dated to the mid-19th century when Old Town was the center of commercial activity in San Diego.  However, there are less likely possibilities that some artifacts may be from other periods.  To build the golf course, Marston had the land scraped and reshaped. so there is at least a chance that Marston himself or people associated with the golf course project might have lost those interesting  buttons. Similarly,  it cannot be known definitively whether or not some of the artifacts landed at the site in the interim period between the Mannasse & Schiller period and the golf course construction,  or even from the period prior to Mannasse & Schiller's ownership when the land was traversed by a path leading from the old settlement to Presidio Hill. 

In addition to 23 buttons recovered during the dig, thousands of other items were turned up by archaeologists who sifted dirt through one-quarter inch mesh.  There was an intriguing arrow point made from porcelain, perhaps an adaptation of Native American (Kumeyaay) culture using European materials.  

Additionally there  were shards of pottery, clay pipes, marbles, bottles, jars, tumblers, stemware, nails, tacks, screws, washers, a gun flint, a writing slate, bone knife handle, bottle fragments, bones from butchered cows, and an interesting variety of shells—to name only some of the catalogued finds. The City of San Diego, in cooperation with the San Diego Archaeological Center, maintains such collections of artifacts.