Early Years of SF Morning Call Newspaper Now Online in Project Jump-Started by The Emperor Norton Trust

October 26, 2025 / John Lumea

Researchers of early San Francisco are well served by historical newspaper clearinghouses like Newspapers.com, Genealogy Bank, and the California Digital Newspaper Collection (CDNC).

Between these three databases, historians can find nearly-complete collections of the earliest mid-to-late-19th-century decades of the Daily Alta California, Daily Evening Bulletin, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, and others — in the case of the Alta, dating back to 1849.

A notable outlier has been the Morning Call.

Founded as the Daily Morning Call in December 1856 and simplifying a bit to The Morning Call in December 1878, the Call has been available online at Newspapers.com and CDNC — starting with the edition of 1 April 1890.

But the only way to access earlier editions of the Call has been via microfiche or the original deadwood.

The culmination of a digitization project that was jump-started by The Emperor Norton Trust a year ago — in September 2024 — the following 26 years’ worth of the early Call arrived on Newspapers.com last month:

Daily Morning Call — 8 December 1863 – 20 December 1878
The Morning Call — 21 December 1878 – 31 December 1889

This

closes a significant longstanding documentary gap in the online historical newspaper record;
opens up a new avenue of research into the life of Emperor Norton — and early San Francisco history more broadly; and — a notable bonus…
creates new access to the editions of the Daily Morning Call that carried Mark Twain’s writing between June and October 1864.

Is the Clock Tower of the San Francisco Ferry Building Based on the Bell Tower of a Cathedral in Spain?

November 15, 2022 / John Lumea

In connection with The Emperor Norton Trust’s recent proposal that the San Francisco Ferry Building’s clock tower be named “The Emperor Norton Tower” next year — the 125th anniversary of the Ferry Building — we’ve been doing some additional research into the design and construction of the building and its tower.

The Ferry Building opened in 1898, and one of the chestnuts that has been repeated about the building for most of its lifetime — increasingly so in the period after World War II — is the claim that the design of the clock tower is “based on” — or “modeled after” — or “patterned after” the 12th-century bell tower, known as La Giralda, of the Seville Cathedral in Spain.

Some commentators have gone so far as to say that the Ferry Building clock tower is a “replica” of the Giralda.

But, the historical and visual record reveals the Ferry Building tower’s architectural debt to the Giralda to be significantly less than these unqualified claims suggest.

Read on for a well-documented, highly illustrated deep-dive.

Joshua Norton of Jackson Street

May 17, 2021 / John Lumea

Two of the most basic modern assumptions about the locations and business enterprises of Joshua Norton in 1852 San Francisco appear not to bear scrutiny.

The assumptions — that Joshua Norton held forth from facilities that he “built” on 3 of the 4 corners of Sansome and Jackson Streets, and that one of these facilities was a rice mill — were espoused and may, in part, have been created by Norton’s 1986 biographer, William Drury.

But, Drury’s claims were undocumented. A deep-dive into the documentary record points to a different picture.

The Emperor Norton Trust

Filtering by Tag: 1890

Early Years of SF Morning Call Newspaper Now Online in Project Jump-Started by The Emperor Norton Trust

Is the Clock Tower of the San Francisco Ferry Building Based on the Bell Tower of a Cathedral in Spain?

Joshua Norton of Jackson Street