San Francisco and San Joaquin Valley Railway signed by Claus Spreckels - Autogra for Sale

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San Francisco and San Joaquin Valley Railway signed by Claus Spreckels - Autogra For Sale

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San Francisco and San Joaquin Valley Railway signed by Claus Spreckels - Autogra:
$310.00

Stock signed by Claus Spreckels as president. Portrait and biography included. Claus Spreckels, formally Adolph Claus J. Spreckels (July 9, 1828 " December 26, 1908) was a major industrialist in Hawai' during the kingdom, republican and territorial periods of the islands' history. Spreckels was born in Lamstedt, Hanover, now a city of Germany. In 1846, he left his homeland to start a new life in the United States. In 1852 he married his childhood sweetheart, Anna Christina Mangels, who had immigrated to New York City with her brother 3 years earlier. They had t13 children, five of whom lived to maturity. The family first settled in South Carolina, where Spreckels opened a grocery store business. Within a short time they moved to New York City, then in 1856 relocated to San Francisco, where Spreckels began a brewery. Spreckels entered the sugar business in the mid-1860s and came to dominate the Hawaiian sugar trade on the West Coast. His first refinery, built in 1867, was at Eighth and Brannan Streets in San Francisco, but by the late 1870s the Brannan Street facilities were running at capacity, so Spreckels chose a site in Potrero Point to open a larger sugar refinery with water access. He called his concerns the California Sugar Refinery. Spreckels used some of his wealth in 1874 to purchase a large tract of ranch and timber land in Aptos, California. He built a large resort hotel and, not far away, an extensive ranch complex. Spreckels was one of the original investors in the Santa Cruz Railroad, which began operation in 1875 and passed through his land on its run between Santa Cruz and Watsonville. The narrow-gauge line was later acquired and standard-gauged by the Southern Pacific Railroad, now part of the Union Pacific Railroad. It was on the Aptos ranch that Spreckels began to experiment with growing sugar beets. In 1888, Spreckels established the Western Beet Sugar Company in Watsonville, which was at that time the largest beet sugar factory in the U.S. By 1890, Spreckels main growing operations had shifted to the Salinas Valley, so he built the 42-mile narrow gauge Pajaro Valley Consolidated Railroad to ship his sugar beets from the fields near Salinas to Watsonville. In 1899, Spreckels opened an even larger factory closer to the main sugar beet fields. He named the new factory Spreckels Sugar Company. A company town grew up around the plant, and still exists as Spreckels, California. The town and the sugar factory were important in the early life of novelist John Steinbeck, and several scenes from his novels take place there. In the 1890s, Spreckels helped found the national sugar trust and renamed his San Francisco property the Western Sugar Refinery and continued to increase his control over the Hawaiian sugar trade. This control over the industry was irksome to Hawaiian planters not directly affiliated with Spreckels and his associates. At the end of the 1890s, they attempted to break free. In 1905, the planters established a cooperative refinery Item ordered may not be exact piece shown. All original and authentic.