San Francisco Gold Rush Merchants

The New York Roots

W Taussig & Co.

Manufactory of California Leather Goods

 

After immigrating to the United States, sometime after 1848, William (Wilhelm) Taussig starts a purse making business at 238 Delancy Street in New York City. The 1850 -51 New York City Directory lists William Tauhsig (sic) as a purse maker. Also listed in that year’s directory is a Hermann Friend doing business in “trimmings”. The term “trimmings”, used in the description of Friend’s business, was meant as an additional garnishing; a decorative accessory or additional item. It seems Taussig and Friend formed a partnership sometime in 1850 to manufacture some type of leather products. The following listings show Taussig and Friend working at separate locations in New York City.

 

 

Listing from the 1850 -51 New York Directory 

 

1851 -52 New York Directory 

 

The New York Herald newspaper advertisement for the dissolution of the partnership between Hermann Friend and Wm. Taussig and Co. appears in the September 4, 1851 edition and Taussig reemerges as William Taussig and Co..  1851 would have been the booming of the gold rush in California and goods of any sort would be in great demand in the supply towns of the California gold fields. This notice would be the start of Taussig forming a business to supply the gold rush with “California Leather Goods” These goods would include patent leather belts, holsters, knife sheaths, gold dust bags, buckskin gloves and porte monnaies. Porte monnaies were a small pocket book or purse used to carry coins or other small items.

 

The New York Herald in March of 1852 has an advertisement by Taussig listing him as WM. Taussig and Co. at 186 Pearl St. offering for sale buckskin for piano manufacturers and the Manufactory of California Leather Goods.

 

 

W. Taussig & Co. clasp used on a leather or cloth belt. These clasps are found in the earliest of California gold camps and can be attributed to the 1851 early 1852-time frame when Taussig was working as WM. Taussig & Co. This is the earliest of the Taussig marked stamped brass clasp.
Image courtesy of Nicholas Kane

 

Taussig Pollack & Co. San Francisco

In July of 1852, just four months after advertising as WM. Taussig & Co, the following advertisement, from the Daily Alta California, appears listing the partnership of Taussig Pollack & Co. Located in the Iron Store in San Francisco. They have just received an assortment of merchandise from the clipper ship “Stag Hound” that included leather belts, holsters and buck skin gloves

 

Stag Hound was launched on December 7, 1850 in East Boston, Massachusetts. Designed by shipbuilder Donald McKay for the California trade, she was briefly the largest merchant ship in the world. She was in active service from 1851 until her total loss in 1861. (Wikipedia)

 

Taussig Pollack & Co. clasp manufactured during the 1852 -56 period Taussig and the Pollack brothers are working together. This is the second of the stamped clasps produced by Taussig 

image by author

 

The Taussig Pollack & Co clasp could have been produced as early as the summer or fall of 1852 but more than likely in 1853 considering the time it would take to manufacture the dies to stamp the brass into a clasp. Both the W. Taussig & Co. and Taussig Pollack & Co. leather and cloth belts and clasps were produced exclusively for the California gold rush market.   

The following information from the 1853 New York City directory places William Taussig and Joseph Pollack working and living in New York. Both Taussig and Pollack share the same business and residence address in New York City.

 

William Taussig working at 186 Pearl St. and residing at Essex St

 

Joseph Pollack working and residing at the same address as Taussig

 

Leopold Pollack is in San Francisco at 117 Sacramento St. working the Taussig Pollack business

 

It is interesting that both Taussig and Joseph Pollack are working and residing at the same address in New York and Taussig is still listed as a purse maker. Taussig is in business with the Pollack brothers in San Francisco yet still maintains his business in New York as a purse maker.

 

 



 The above advertisement from the 1852 -53 San Francisco directory lists Taussig and Pollack brothers, Leopold and Joseph, as partners in the San Francisco manufacturing and importing business. From the New York records it appears William Taussig and Joseph Pollack never left New York and Leopold Pollack was running the San Francisco business. There is no residence listing for Taussig in San Francisco. The statement “Sole Agency for William Taussig & Co. New York” suggests Taussig is the proprietor (owner) and Taussig Pollack & Co. were the agents (persons who act on behalf of another person or group) in San Francisco.

 

Clipping from the 1855 -56 New York City directory listing Taussig & Pollack Brothers doing business at 51 Cedar 

 

 

The above clipping is the last listing showing Taussig and the Pollack Brothers in business together. William Taussig moved both his business and residence address several times from 1851 to 1857. Taussig worked at 238 Delancy,, 186 Pearl St., 15 Dey St. and 51 Cedar St. in New York.

 

BUCKLES or CLASPS

What we call Buckles today were referred to as “Clasps” during the California gold rush

 

Wetzlar &Taussig New York

Importers


Leopold Wetzlar first appears in the 1852 -53 New York City directory 


New York directory of 1854 -55 shows Wetzlar working at the 15 Dey St. address

Wetzlar & Taussig clasp. This is the last of the Taussig marked stamped brass clasps.

Possibly only produced for one year
Image courtesy of Max Bell

1856 listing for Wetzlar & Taussig 15 Dey St. New York City


This clipping from the September 1857 New York Herald shows Wetzlar & Taussig’s business venture fails in September of 1857. Taussig appears to vanish from New York City after the failure of the Wetzlar Taussig partnership in 1857.

 

One thing that should be noted on the listings from the New York and San Francisco directories is that the information contained in the listings was gathered prior to the directory being published. The information in the listings could have been obtained as early as a year before the directory was published or as soon as a few days before. That being said all directory information is approximate.

 

References:

New York City Directories 1848 -1862

San Francisco Directories   1850 -1862

LeCount & Strong's Directory of San Francisco 1854

New York Herald various editions 1848 -1860

New York Evening Post

New York Gazette

Daily Alta California

Wikipedia

 

email - oral interviews:

Nicholas Kane
Cal Coyer

THIS Weekend!

Don't Miss This Show!

 

 

Antique Bottles, Insulators, Advertising, Old West and GOLD RUSH collectables

SEE y'all there - rs -

From Peachridge Glass

Jeff Wichmann: So I didn’t tell many people that the green Eastern Cider in our recent auction was dug by me as a 15-year old in Aptos. There was a dump near the Post Office and we found a lot of stuff, a number of Eastern Ciders. Bob West found out about it and drove to my house and offered me $40 for it which I accepted. I sold his collection and it ended up selling to another collector as Bob wouldn’t sell it to me. Ken Salazar somehow ended up with it and unbeknownst to me the bottle I found as a youngster was sitting in my office ready for the auction. I told Dennis Fox, my bottling partner about it and he put a sizable bid in at the end of the auction and to my astonishment I have it back after an almost 50 year hiatus.
These pictures are ones sent to me from Jeff Watts of Hawaii. I am astonished at how beautiful his E.C.’s are and all of his sodas are. So it took a lot of time and a lot of money but I can finally rest knowing I have probably the best bottle I ever found back on my shelf. It’s the first bottle I’ve (Dennis) ever won in my own auction. I have a policy of not bidding in my own sale. I’m sure glad Dennis did. The single photo is my new addition.

Thanks to Peachridge Glass - rs -

P. Boffer - a Gold Rush Era Mystery / Part 2

Part 2 - Steamboat via Brush Creek

A few weeks later, after deer season was over, curiosity got the better of us. The discoverers of the Steamboat Mine didn't just claw their way to the top of the mountain and start pulling out gold. They, like the hundreds (or thousands) of others in the area, were following a trail of breadcrumbs in hopes of finding the mother lode.  We'd already worked the south side of the mountain below "Steamboat City" to death. We'd located the cemetery for the town, as well as the mountains of rock piles and hydraulic debris left behind by the floating dredges and the monitors. Whatever had once been, had been obliterated by Depression Era mining.

But there just had to be a pony in the closet, somewhere. That somewhere turned out to be Brush Creek. A page in a diary with a hand drawn map, dating to the 1870's, clearly showed a trail heading upstream from the river along Brush Creek on the north side of the Steamboat Divide. About a mile upstream, we started encountering hand stacked piles, (not dredging tailing piles), but old - old hand stacks with metal trash in them. Anyone who's ever dug both TOC and Gold Rush era trash knows the difference between the cans. It's like comparing a beer can to the side of a battleship. That and the massive amounts of solder used in the 60's solder seam cans compared to TOC versions made 40 or 50 years later...

Gopher holes tunneled into the base of the mountain on each side of the creek increased in number as we continued to head upstream; as did the amount of hand stack piles. Yep, there'd been miners here in the 1860's; and lots of them! My old trusty Garret ADSII was getting a heckuva workout. Mule shoes, ox shoes, cans, hunks of rusty metal; you name it, Mr. Metal Detector was finding it. The absence of square nails either in the creek bed, or on the raised benches above the creek, indicated scattered, transient occupation. Pitch your tent, pan a bit, prospect, dig a coyote hole or two, and move on seemed to be the order of the day.

About three miles upstream a good size tunnel revealed itself on the south side of the creek. 

Just past the tunnel was a large, deep, steep canyon heading uphill, also on the south. To the right (north) a huge flat bench above the creek began to spread out. The amount of hand stacking present was mind boggling! And so was the quantity of square nails present. I'd never heard of "Brush Creek City", but if there was one, this may well have been "it". Tent and cabin sites were evident everywhere. This was well before the days of laptops, hand held GPS, and all the modern conveniences; but a compass, topo map, and a general guess about how far in we'd hiked seemed to put us directly below the Steamboat Pocket which should have been located about a mile up the draw (seemingly straight up). Turns out, it was. And this was ground zero of the initial discovery leading to the bonanza that they'd found above. There's just something about exploring a gold rush era site that makes the back of your neck tingle. Those who've done it can relate! And the more we explored this site, the more I tingled.

Just after taking a lunch break, I decided to try my luck at nugget shooting. Yeh, as if I was going to find a chunk of gold in one of the tailing piles that had managed to slip by the original prospectors... Much to my surprise, a few minutes later, the detector went off. Not just a faint signal though, more like a car was buried in this 8' high mound of round rocks. A  half hour later and about three feet in, out popped the culprit. Gold?! Nope, a weird looking piece of metal that had been soldered together. One thing was for certain, it was old; Real Old! Into my backpack it went. I'd be glad I saved it.

The rest of the day was spent detecting and pulling up oxen shoes, mule shoes, cans, metal "stuff" and busted up bottles ranging from the 1860's through the 80's. An aqua neck with a glop whiskey top was one of the dug shards that gets one excited. Chalmers? Gold Dust? Tea Kettle? Or was it just a Lewis Hess / Damiana Bitters... We'll never know as the rest of it escaped discovery~. Between flooding, snow drifts and months long permafrost in the winter, it's not surprising that everything was splattered. Still, it was a blast, and we'd discovered an area that hadn't been pounded by every digger in the area.

That evening I realized that I'd gotten sidetracked when I discovered that mystery hunk of metal in the first tailing pile. I'd immediately taken the "thing" down to the creek, washed it, and continued on upstream with tools and detector. What if that loud signal had been gold and the metal thing had just been there by coincidence? Solving the mystery would have to wait, as it was now late November and the winter snows had started to pile up in that deep dark canyon.

The snow drifts in the deep canyons of the Applegate drainage are tenacious, often lingering well into May. This year was no different. Finally, around the middle of the month, we decided to head back. Only scattered patches of snow remained and the creek was running clear and cold. I've always been like a homing pigeon when it comes to revisiting spots. Once I've been there, I can inevitably find my way back. And so, this particular morning found me making my way back to the hand stacked pile of boulders where I'd found the "whatzit". My Garrett went wild on the tailing pile the second I switched it on. Sure enough, there was more to be found in the same spot as I'd been the autumn before.

Another foot in and I located what was driving Mr. Metal Detector nuts. Gold? Nope... It was another piece of metal. I carefully pulled it out. Low and behold, it was the other half of the "thing" I'd dug the previous year. 

Imagine my surprise though, when I continued moving rocks, and the mouth of a sheared and refired lip made it's appearance. A bottle! Not just any bottle though; it turned out to be an open pontiled flask, wrapped in wool cloth. Elation was once again short lived as it, like the Jockey Club, had succumbed to the elements. But, most of it was there. 

It was then that I pictured the other metal half in my mind's eye. Mystery solved, it was a canteen!

Once home with my finds, I put both metal halves in warm ammonia water to soak and then began to clean it with a soft toothbrush. Slowly, as if my magic, paint began to appear from beneath the rust as I worked my way up from the base. Blue paint; faded by well over a century of sitting beneath tons of rocks. And then it happened. Letters began to appear.

P. Boffer 1866. 

Once reassembled, the flask slid into the lower half like a glove, and the upper half slid snugly into place over the lower. 

 The question begs though; Who was P. Boffer, and why did his canteen end up deep inside a mountain of hand stacked rocks in the bottom of a frozen canyon in the wilderness?

Countless weeks spent in research have yielded not a shard of evidence to solve the mystery. No records in census, no  death records, no records in Southern Oregon, no records of Civil War Service. Nothing / Nada. And so the Gold Rush era mystery remains. 

Who was P. Boffer?

Coming Soon!!!

 

We have a new remodeled building with the brightest LED lighting ever,  roll-up door for dealers to enter and unload easier. More room for more dealers. We are pushing for 130 tables.

New dealers to the show and lots of fresh to the market items.

 

SEE YOU ALL THERE

P. Boffer - a gold rush era mystery

PART 1

Gold Rush, in the strictest terms is defined as, "a rapid movement of people to a newly discovered goldfield".

The first major gold rush, to California, occurred in 1848–49. It was followed by others in the US, Australia (1851–53), South Africa (1884), and Canada (Klondike, 1897–98). Successive gold rushes occurred in western North America: Fraser Canyon, the Cariboo (sic) district and other parts of British Columbia, in Nevada, in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, eastern Oregon, and western New Mexico Territory and along the lower Colorado River. Resurrection Creek, near Hope, Alaska was the site of Alaska's first gold rush in the mid–1890s. Other notable Alaska Gold Rushes were Nome and the Fortymile River.

South Western Oregon's day in the limelight started during the winter of 1851 - 1852 when frustrated miners fanned north from Thompsons Dry Diggin's, in what is now Yreka. Table Rock City, (now Jacksonville) became the hub, since the first gold discovery had occurred on Daisy Creek, just a couple of blocks from what ultimately became "downtown". Alas, as was so often the case, the surfaces placers were shallow and quickly exhausted. But numerous other rich placer finds occurred in the Applegate area (south of J'ville) during the 1850's through the late 60's. Many of those finds lead to the discovery of veins of gold high on the ridges above the placer workings, and the hard rock mining industry came into its own shortly thereafter.

One of those hard rock mining areas came to be known as "Steamboat". It was located on the California border, above Brush Creek. Brush Creek paid well in the 1860's, for those patient enough to move rocks and boulders by hand, while standing knee to hip deep in the ice cold waters that flowed from west to east in this deep canyon.

According to historical records I obtained dating to the teens;

"The Steamboat Pocket was discovered in 1860 near the headwaters of the Applegate River. Over several year’s time, it produced over $350,000."

"The Steamboat lode was perhaps the most productive of these quartz ledges. During 1860 and 1861 it yielded $280,000. These two years included the early quartz mining history of Southern Oregon. No great successes were gained after that period. The gold was too scattered in pockets, and methods were too primitive then to give lasting success to quartz mining, and it was abandoned for a number of years.

"The Fowler lode, at Steamboat City, twenty miles from Jacksonville, is also at present lying idle. This ledge was very rich near the surface, where the rock was considerably disintegrated. The contents of a rich chimney or pocket were extracted, and crushed in arrastras run with horse-power. Major J. T. Glenn, one of the owners, says $350,000 were taken out. Arrastras were erected at a ledge on Thompson’s Creek, a tributary of Applegate, to work the ore extracted, but the rock did not pay, and it was finally abandoned."

Fast forward to the 1970's, and not a trace of the once bustling Steamboat City remained. It was located on a high divide at an elevation of roughly 2700 feet. A few open mine shafts and tunnels remained, which appeared to have been worked sporadically during the depression era (as evidenced by the abundance of machine made round nails found holding the mine timbers together). What had once been the Steamboat Pocket had been opened up by some type of heavy equipment, probably also during the 1930's. An ash layer several inches thick indicated that the area had burned. However, metal detecting revealed that mixed in with the round nails scattered down the steep hillside, an equal quantity of square nails existed below this ash layer. Bingo!

A few pockets of pre-TOC trash were detected. As is typical, everything found was broken, no doubt due to a combination of over a century of freeze / thaw, and the efforts of depression era miners. It had been a typical high country bottle dig. Lots of work, and nothing to show for it.

As we headed back to the truck I noticed an incredibly steep ravine just east of the town site which, at first, had escaped notice. Not wanting to leave any stone un-turned, we slipped and slid down the embankment. Imagine my surprise when I spotted a bottle lodged against the trunk of a piece of brush. Well, I'll be, an aqua acid bottle, over a foot tall, crude as can be, half buried - laying on the surface - waiting to be plucked. And pluck I did~ With the exception of a couple of rock nicks, and 100+ years of crud inside, it looked to be in good shape.

(I've still got it!)

It was then that my rookie digging partner said, "Heh, I found a bottle too". I made my way over to him and sure enough, he had. Only his was amber... And it was round, and it had a glop whiskey top! Being a novice digger, I took over for him at that point. Slowly, I whisked away the dirt. Embossing! Slow, and steady, with the hands of a surgeon, I scraped away the dirt, and slowly cradled the find in both hands; a sixth embossed Jockey Club Whiskey / G. W. Chesley & Co. / S.F..
 

 

Elation though, was short lived. When I picked it up by the neck to hand it to him, the base, around the bottom mold seam stayed in my left hand. Uggh, Freeze break!


Enough was enough, for that day...

(to be continued)

American Bottle Auction

 

American Bottle Auction # 64 ends Sunday October 22 at 7pm PDT

Just a reminder to get your bid in before the auction closes - rs -

 

Tulare 2017

Hi from Ventura, CA

Hi Everyone,


I am new to this blog...but do really enjoy reading Western Bottle News and all the great stories and digs. I am Scott Horner in Ventura, CA and have been collecting mainly Bitters for a long time. I do have some Ventura bottles but there really isn't old glass here.

Another Recent Dig

Submission by JD 

Thanks JD - rs -