Background
Lewis Gerstle was born on December 17, 1824, of Jewish stock at Ichenhausen, Bavaria.
Lewis Gerstle was born on December 17, 1824, of Jewish stock at Ichenhausen, Bavaria.
In 1847, Gerstle came to the United States, working his way across the Atlantic as a deck boy. He settled for a short time in Louisville, Kentucky, where he became a pedler.
In 1849, he went to New Orleans, and the next year to California via Panama. He first started a fruit-stand but soon entered the gold-mines near Georgetown, El Dorado County, as a day-laborer.
Here he met Louis Sloss, another Bavarian, and a friendship and business partnership were formed which lasted fifty years and made both men wealthy and well known in the world of finance.
Leaving the mines, they first opened a wholesale grocery business in or near Sacramento, then moved to San Francisco and became mining-stock brokers. The firm (Louis Sloss & Company) also became the most extensive buyer of wool and manufacturer of sole leather on the Pacific Coast.
After the purchase of Alaska (1867), Gerstle’s firm and two others acquired the rights and privileges of the old Russian American Company.
These three firms were the nucleus of the Alaska Commercial Company, in the creation of which Gerstle was active and prominent. Almost immediately (1870), the Alaska Commercial Company acquired, from the United States, the exclusive right for twenty years of seal fishing on the islands of St. Paul and St. George.
In return for this monopoly, the Company paid the government a yearly rental and a royalty upon each seal captured. The Company, as a part of its agreement, established trading-posts, schools, and churches in various parts of Alaska, and in numerous other ways contributed greatly to the development of the country.
Under Gerstle’s leadership the Company established a line of ocean steamers between San Francisco and Alaska, and put into operation more than a score of large river boats on the Yukon and steamers plying between Nome and Dawson.
For many years, and up until his death, Gerstle was president of the Company, and its successful operations formed the basis of his considerable fortune. His business interests, however, were not confined to Alaska.
In the late eighties, he cooperated with Senator Warner Miller of New York in the launching of a company to build the proposed Nicaragua Canal. He was a director of the Nevada National Bank, the Union Trust Company, and the California-Hawaiian Sugar Company.
For a few months, he was treasurer of the University of California, filling the place made vacant by the death of his partner Sloss. Gerstle held extensive blocks of real estate in the business portions of San Francisco.
For a time, Gerstle was a director of the Hebrew Asylum and Home Society.
Of the Jewish faith, Gerstle was a member of Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco.
Gerstle devoted much time and study to charitable work, and all worthy charities shared generously in his wide benefactions; but he was especially interested in aiding orphans and the aged and feeble.
Quotes from others about the person
Despite his almost four-score years, Gerstle could be described by a contemporary at the time of his death as “a most magnificent type of vigorous manhood, active, energetic, firm and resolute, ” still displaying the “qualities which have characterized all his acts since early youth”.
In 1858, Gerstle went East, and married Hannah Greenebaum of Philadelphia, a sister of his partner’s wife and a native of Bavaria. She and seven children survived him.