Fort Mason

Fort Mason occupies a high, rocky point that served as a strategic military outpost for over a century. Before it became an American fortification, the Spanish military established a battery here in the late eighteenth century to guard the entrance to the bay. The United States Army later seized the site and eventually renamed it in honor of Richard Barnes Mason, a military governor of California. The location was so highly valued for its commanding view of the Golden Gate that the military spent decades evicting civilian residents who had built homes on the slopes, viewing these inhabitants as squatters on essential defensive land.