Lands End has been transformed from the time when the Yelamu, an independent tribe of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples, lived there amid drifting sand dunes, sheer cliffs, and isolated pocket beaches, with the Ramaytush shaping the land for thousands of years through burning, pruning, and other practices that supported native foods and animal habitat. After Europeans arrived, the area was grazed, built on, scraped, blasted, tunneled, quarried, fortified, and planted with an artificial forest, and from the 1860s onward roads and buildings brought more sightseers. In the 1880s, Adolph Sutro developed Lands End as a sprawling public pleasure ground served by steam trains, streetcars, and an auto highway along the cliffs, while the U.S. Army further altered the area by building Fort Miley and extensive fortifications. During the Great Depression, Civil Works Administration workers planted thousands of non-native trees on previously open hillsides, and today the National Park Service preserves both the cultural and natural landscapes. Lands End also figured in an early California civil rights test case when, on July 4, 1897, San Franciscan John Harris was denied entry to Sutro Baths because he was African American after his group had paid the admission fee. Harris sued Adolph Sutro under California’s recently enacted Dibble Civil Rights Act, won in San Francisco Superior Court, and received the minimum one hundred dollars in damages, though Sutro’s wealth allowed exclusionary practices to continue. The case nevertheless encouraged other civil rights suits, while the Dibble Act itself, advanced through pressure from African American leaders including Afro-American League state president Theophilus Morton and authored by Assemblyman Henry Dibble, established that citizens of every color or race were entitled to full and equal access to places of public accommodation or amusement and helped set a precedent for later civil rights legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Today Lands End includes the USS San Francisco Memorial, remains of the Ohioan, Lyman Stewart, and Frank Buck visible at low tide, coastal scrub and dune habitats with native plants and wildlife, introduced Monterey pine and cypress, and ongoing restoration and stewardship within the ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone.
