This Couple Found a Mysterious 150-Pound Sculpture Buried in Their Backyard. Now, They're Trying to Figure Out Who Made It

Greg Gatwood was working in his San Francisco backyard this May when his shovel struck something hard beneath the dirt. Gatwood, a 65-year-old landscape contractor, figured that he’d hit an old fence post footing. Instead, after freeing the object with a pickax, Gatwood found himself face to face with a bust of a woman.

Made of limestone, the hefty piece consisted of a woman’s head and neck rising from a rectangular base. It was substantial, weighing roughly 150 pounds and measuring about 22 inches wide, 18 inches high and 10 inches deep. Over the past few months, Gatwood and Gittelsohn have made it their mission to figure out who carved the bust—and how it ended up in their backyard.

It was not created by a hobbyist.” Experts caution that definitively identifying the sculpture’s creator will be challenging, if not impossible, without a signature or some sort of historical documentation. Stackpole was an American sculptor and muralist who lived and worked in San Francisco during the first half of the 20th century. He moved to the city in 1901 and left his mark on it over the next several decades.

In the 1930s, the artist created one of the frescoes inside Coit Tower as part of the Public Works of Art Project, one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal reform programs during the Great Depression. Stackpole also carved the two towering Art Deco figures that still guard the entrance of the historic Pacific Coast Stock Exchange building in San Francisco.

Additionally, he made pieces for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition and the 1939-40 Golden Gate International Exposition, which was held on the city’s artificial Treasure Island. In addition to creating his own art, Stackpole spent nearly two decades teaching sculpture at the California School of Fine Arts, later renamed the San Francisco Art Institute. The institute closed in 2022, but the building that housed its sculpture department sits across the street from Gittelsohn and Gatwood’s home in the city’s Russian Hill neighborhood.

Before the couple’s two-story house was built in 1948, the property was an empty lot—and Gittelsohn suspects that Stackpole or one of his pupils might have buried the sculpture there. Ralph Stackpole, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Historian Anne Schnoebelen, vice president of the board of directors at the Treasure Island Museum in San Francisco, says that it’s possible the piece was created by either Stackpole or Adaline Kent or Helen Phillips, two of his students who lived nearby. She speculates that the bust might have been featured at the Golden Gate International Exposition, in an area called the Court of Pacifica.