The word Easter comes from Old English Eastre, from Parent Germanic Austron, a goddess of fertility and sunrise, celebrated in the spring. The first mountaintop Easter Sunrise event was held on Mount Rubidoux in Riverside, California in 1909. A cross dedicated to Junipero Serra was inititally constructed atop the mountain in 1907 by Frank Miller, founder of the Mission Inn, www.missioninnmuseum.com, and his business partners, including Henry E. Huntington, as part of a park they developed there to promote their housing subdivision at its base. The lots failed to sell, but the park caught the public imagination.

In 1909, encouraged by reformer Jacob Riis, the community began an Easter sunrise service at the mountaintop cross. This was the first event of its kind and the idea quickly spread. In the San Francisco Bay Area, Joseph Leonard, developer of Ingleside Terraces would take the Mount Davidson monument signpost concept to Redwood City in 1929, constructing an eight-two foot high cross above the homes he was building at Emerald Lake.

Gallery
The first cross was erected on Mount Davidson in 1923 for a Easter Sunrise Service, led by Dean J. Wilmer Gresham of Grace Cathedral, due to the organizing efforts of James Decatur. Margo Patterson Doss writes, “thousands of people have made the climb in the pre-dawn chill, sometimes in heavy fog or pouring rain, to await the Easter sunrise sermons on the mountain. Impelled by the same conviction that has led pilgrims to walk to Rome, to Jerusalem, to Mecca and up Fujiyama.” Clarence F. Pratt here with residents of Westwood Park and St. Francis Woods posing for a photograph to advertise one of the earliest Easter sunrise events, an annual tradition that continues to this day.
	By 1928, Madie Brown was leading a campaign to convince the City to buy the land atop its highest hill from developer A.S. Baldwin to create Mount Davidson Park.
Article about the annual Easter Sunrise Service in 1929.
	During the Great Depression, workmen from the carpenter’s union donated their labor to replace the second cross to be burned down on Mount Davidson in 1932.
Emma, the wife of the developer, A. S. Baldwin, here in front of a model home planned for the Golden Gate Exposition on Treasure Island, donated the six acre crest of Mount Davidson for the 103-foot high cross making it visible from most parts of San Francisco by day and up to 75 miles away when illuminated at night. Designed by the builders of San Francisco’s tallest buildings, George Kelham and Henry J. Brunnier, the fifth cross to be built on the site and the world’s largest, at the time, was dedicated in 1934. (Courtesy California Association of REALTORS®.}
Clarence F. Pratt, Chairman of the Sunrise Easter Service Committee, Director of Pacific Coast Aggregates, Inc., and President of the Outdoor Christmas Tree Association of California, in front of the cross he worked to have built in 1934. Built with funds from many subscribers and schoolchildren, thirty thousand feet of lumber were used to form the 750 cubic yards of concrete around thirty tons of reinforced steel. (Courtesy Glenn Gullmes.)
	James Decatur with Monson Brothers, construction contractors for the cross. (Courtesy Glenn Gullmes.)
George Kelham‘s design for the Mount Davidson Cross appears a simple one, but the taper of the upright and its rise above the crossarm hints of his stature in the pantheon of Bay Area architects. Architectural historian, Patrick McGrew wrote the landmark nomination for the Sunrise Easter Cross. “It is an object lesson in design purity - the unadorned cross itself is expressed in complete simplicity, as a style that is at once both contemporary, and timeless. The podium upon which it rests bears traces of the Art Deco styling that was being explored by its designer, George Kelham as early as 1928.” His Shell Oil Building is an “art deco tour de force.” The cross was his only monument design and was among his final projects. (Courtesy Bob DeLiso.)
	The dimensions of the cross would be as substantial as the skyscrapers and bridges Henry J. Brunnier built. Its cylindrical, concrete block foundation is 18 feet in diameter at the bottom and 14 1/2 feet at the top, going 16 feet down into the bedrock below. Upon the foundation, there is a 62 foot diameter platform with 7 35-foot wide steps. The cross is 10 square feet at the base, and tapers to 9 feet from one tip to the other. (Courtesy Bob DeLiso.)
	The cross is essentially unaltered from its 1934 appearance at this dedication ceremony when the copper box was lowered into its base. It holds 1848 and 1934 editions of the Bible, stones from the Garden of Gethsemane, water from the River Jordan, 1933 city and telephone directories, and issues of all the leading newspapers of 1934. (Courtesy Glenn Gullmes.)

	Just a week after Madie Brown wrote her letter asking President Roosevelt to light the cross, the Longshoremen Union voted to shut down the shipping industry along the entire Pacific Seaboard on March 23, 1934 - the day before the Mount Davidson Cross ceremony. The President intervened, appointing a fact finding commission and convincing the union to postpone their walkout, just two days before the cross lighting ceremony.(Author’s Collection.)
	President Roosevelt pressed a gold telegraph key sending electricity over the wires to turn on the twelve 1,000 watt floodlights (three each on four poles concealed among trees) surrounding the Mount Davidson Cross before a crowd of 50,000. Four years later, President Roosevelt would press a telegraph key from the White House to officially open the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937. (Courtesy Ron Davis.)
Program for the first sunrise service at the new 103-foot cross on April 1, 1934. The Committee of Arrangements included Hans Nelson, retired builder of Westwood Park; August L. Lang, realtor for Balboa Terrace; Fernando Nelson, builder of Mount Davidson Manor; and Margaret Mary Morgan printed the program.
	The cross continued to be lit both Easter and Christmas weeks until 1955. In response to a letter from a soldier bound for Korea saying the lit cross was the last sight he had of home Lakeside Presbyterian Church raised funds for year-round lighting. After the energy crisis in 1976, lighting was reduced back to Easter and Christmas weeks. With the 50th anniversary lighting additions to the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges, the Re-Light Mount Davidson Committee was organized in 1987 to raise funds to resume full-time lighting of the monument neighbors described as “inspirational, comforting, and dramatic.” Chairman of the committee, Terence K. McAteer, son of Senator J. Eugene McAteer, said “the cross is spectacular when lit, really beautiful...it’s very important as a historical symbol.”(Courtesy Jim Ferry.)
The success of the relighting committee’s effort gets the attention of those who want the cross torn down all together. In 1990, a lawsuit was filed against the City stating that the presence of the cross on city land violated the California Constitution. Conflict over ownership of Mount Davidson makes its way to the California Supreme Court a second time who rules that it is a violation of the separation of church and state for the City of San Francisco to own a religious monument on its highest geographic point. The lights lit by President Roosevelt in 1934 are torn out by the city in an effort to satisfy the plaintiffs.(Courtesy Glenn Gullmes.)
	San Francisco’s largest regularly scheduled religious observance has continued every year since 1923 without interruption. Just after Mount Davidson Manor resident, Bill Brown, is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, he takes his family on a pilgrimage to the cross for his last Easter sunrise in 1993, the 70th anniversary of the event. Photographed here in his last months, holding hands with his wife of 50 years, Espie, she will pass away the following year, at the exact same age of seventy-two. (Courtesy Margie Brown Whitnah.)
	Neighbors organize the Friends of Mount Davidson Conservancy in 1996 to protect Madie Brown’s legacy. After the city decides to auction the land under the cross, the Conservancy negotiates a 5.62 acre reduction in the amount of park land to be sold. The Conservancy also gets a conservation easement added to the auctioned property description to ensure that nothing can ever be built on the property - even antennas, according to City Attorney Louise Renne. (A telecom company proposed saving the monument, by tearing it down and rebuilding it as an antenna!)
November 1997 Voter Pamphlet Map for “Proposition F would approve sale of 0.38 acres of Mount Davidson Park, including the land upon which the cross is located, to the Council of Armenian Organizations of Northern California for $26,000. The terms of the sale require that the land remain open space for public access and prohibit the buyer from making commercial, industrial or residential use of the land.”
	Sixty-eight percent of voters approved the sale of the summit of Mount Davidson Park, originally part of the property donated to the city by Mrs. A.S. Baldwin. Per court order, signs are now posted at the park entrances and at the perimeter of the now privately owned summit around the cross to reaffirm its separation from the public park land.
Postcard view of the Mount Davidson Cross from the highest point in San Francisco celebrating its preservation in 1997 by the Council of Armenian Organizations of Northern California.
	The court order restricts lighting of the cross to two days a year. Members of the Metropolitan Community Church celebrate Easter eve with rainbow colored lighting in 1998.
Purchased by the Council as a memorial to the Armenian Genocide, a plaque is installed at the base of the Mount Davidson Cross on the Commemoration Day, April 24, 1998, at the Mount Davidson Cross. The world leader of the Armenian Church comes to the site in 2000 to celebrate the church’s 1700th anniversary. (Courtesy Glenn Gullmes.)
	San Franciscan journalist and open space activist, Margot Patterson Doss, wrote, “Bridges, towers, pyramids, radar fixtures, microwave relay stations, Nike missile sites and other recent soaring monuments notwithstanding, San Francisco’s most enduring landmark for the last 200 years has been a cross on a mountaintop. Although it hasn’t always been the same cross, or the same mountaintop, the landmark has always stood near the sea.”Clandestine Cross Climbers in the 1970s. (Courtesy Miraloma Community Church.)