There was/is no reason to name a racetrack after Toribio Tanforan. This is bullshit invented to hide the Turners – THE TURNVEREIN GERMANS – who went to Belmont Park on the train, and to the horse races. Germans love horses and race tracks.
TURNVEREIN
TANFORAN
Torbria may have been A Prussian from Chile – who was a Turner. The guy who wrote the following sees this tombstone as a post-fabrication. Torbria was twenty-three when his wife died. Did he get remarried?
Jon Presco
| Birth: |
1821 |
| Death: |
Apr. 4, 1884 |
 Information from Julia Christy 4-1-2004 Toribio Tanforan died 4 April 1884 Maria de los Angeles Valencia Tanforan (his wife) died 10-12-1844. They are Julia’s great grandparents. It appears that the tombstone was inscribed long after the fact with approximate dates. The 1884 dates match what is shown in the Mission Dolores Burial Register and the obits that were published in the San Francisco Call Newpsper. The tombstone reads 1882. (If memory serves me right, the tombstone is not listed in the DAR book of cemetery epitaphs, so might have been placed after 1950 by the last of their children. |
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| Burial: Mission Dolores Cemetery San Francisco San Francisco County California, USA Plot: Stone 32, Station 4 |
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About ten years ago I read that one of the Tanforan cottages was moved from Belmont, they on a Spanish land grant that came to be owned by Toribio Tanforan, the grandson-in-law of Jose Antonio Sanchez.
No one can find any history of Toribio. Why then is being honored? Jose Sanchez is very famous in regards to Spanish land grants. There is no Tansforan land grant. One historian says Toribo was a gaucho from Chile, and thus he was a excellent horseman. And, that’s it! This is what conects the mysterious Torribo to the Tanforan race track and Belmont. Give me a break! Why are two houses in San Francisco named Tanforan?
I suspect Tanforan was the name of the German theme park that Charles Janke built in Belmont, it said he modeling it after a German way of life. Tanforan is not a Spanish name. It also resembles Turnverien, who were Forty-Eighters who fled Europe in the ‘Erupecan Spring’. Consider the ‘Arab Spring’ no doubt named after the revolutions that swept Europe, including Italy, that bid Count Leonetto Cipriani to leave his home in Belmont and pretty much rule the United Italy under Garibaldi and Victor Emanuel. Why wasn’t Ciprianis name applied to a race track? I did find a ‘Cipriani Dog Park’.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanforan_Racetrack
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=7727412
https://www.ohio.edu/chastain/rz/turnvere.htm
The Turnvereine made a contribution to the integration of German-Americans into their new home. The organizations continue to exist in areas of heavy German immigration, such as Iowa, Texas, Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, Minnesota,Missouri, Syracuse, NY, Kentucky, New York City, and Los Angeles.
Together with Carl Schurz, the American Turners helped support the election of Abraham Lincoln as president of the United States. They provided the bodyguard at his inauguration on March 4, 1861, and at his funeral in April, 1865. In the Camp Jackson Affair, a large force of German volunteers helped prevent Confederate forces from seizing the government arsenal in St. Louis just prior to the beginning of the war.[6]
Like other German-American groups, the American Turners experienced discrimination during World War I. The German language was banned in schools and universities, and German language journals and newspapers were shut down, but the Turner societies continued to function.[3]
Rosamond Press 
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