All The Right Notes/One For The Books: A Cancelled Note from Samuel Hellman, Los Angeles, 4 May 1868

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

Posts on this blog have referred frequently to Isaias W. Hellman (1842-1920), the brilliant Jewish merchant and financier who was, from 1868 to 1871, partner of William Workman and F.P.F. Temple in the second bank founded in Los Angeles, Hellman, Temple and Company, before dissolving the partnership to established The Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank and steered it ably to great success, while Temple and Workman went on their own and ended in ruin.

Less featured, but still mentioned on occasion, was Isaias’ brother Herman (1843-1906), who became known as a merchant (especially with Hellman, Haas and Company, the forerunner of Smart and Final) and fellow banker with his brother until a falling out occurred in 1903. That year, Herman built his namesake commercial building at Spring and 4th streets, what was then the largest structure in the Angel City and which remains standing today.

This post highlights their cousin, Samuel (1836-1896), specifically a cancelled promissory note from the Homestead’s collection and dated 4 May 1868. The document, as was customary, is torn at the bottom right because the borrower, having redeemed the note and paid off the debt, was allowed to remove their signature. The loan was $300, due thirty days from date and subject to 2% per month interest until paid and, though, there isn’t any more we can say about the financial instrument, we can discuss aspects of Samuel Hellman’s life of a half-century.

Chain migration is a term that refers to the arrival of an immigrant in a given place and then the sending of information back home encouraging others from the city, town or village to migrate to that location. While this can be general to the community in the homeland, it can also embrace family members inspired to join their “pioneer” relative wherever it is that the latter settled.

Samuel and a brother Isaiah came to the Angel City in the mid-1850s from their native Reckendorf, a town in Bavaria north of Nuremberg. They quickly established a niche for themselves in opening a store that sold dry goods of various kind, but which also had the distinction of being the first bookstore in town.

An ad in the 19 June 1855 edition of the newly launched El Clamor Público, the town’s first Spanish-language newspaper, founded by the remarkable teenage entrepreneur Francisco P. Ramirez, showed that the brothers sold cutlery, cigars and cigarettes, matches, stationery and sweets. The Hellmans also sold subscriptions and advertising space for Ramirez’ paper. A little over a year later, an advertisement in the Los Angeles Star noted that fancy goods, ribbons, perfume, sewing silk and combs were sold as the establishment moved to a new store in the same structure.

To that date, the business was located on Mellus’ Row, an adobe building constructed by Alexander Bell and then sold to Henry Mellus and which was located at the southeast corner of Aliso and Los Angeles streets, where the Federal Building is situated now. Later in 1857, however, Jonathan Temple completed his two-story brick building at the south end of a pie-shaped tract between Main and Spring streets, between Temple and 1st, and Hellman and Brother moved there.

For the Christmas holiday, as an ad in the Star of 12 December showed, an emphasis was made on the offering of gift books, ladies’ dressing cases, fancy toys, jewelry and candy along with the aforementioned items. Wallpaper and window glass were also mentioned along with “newspapers from all parts of the States and Europe, as well as the latest publications, regularly received by every steamer.”

Moreover, the Hellmans offered the Los Angeles’ first circulating library and, while an attempt was made, in 1859 with Jonathan Temple as a leading figure, to found a public library, this initial effort failed. It was not until 1872 that today’s Los Angeles Public Library was established with Temple’s nephew, Thomas, son of F.P.F., as a founding trustee.

In 1859, the two nephews of Samuel and Isaiah, Herman and Isaias, migrated to Los Angeles, no doubt encouraged by the success of their uncles, and the two teens were put to work as clerks in the store. Within a few years, a schism developed in which the partnership dissolved with Isaiah opening a store that focused on dry goods, while Samuel continued with an emphasis on books and stationery.

Herman and Isaias continued with Samuel for a short time and the former was made a partner, while the latter embarked on his own after purchasing the store of another prominent Los Angeles Jew, Adolph Portugal. Herman’s tenure ended on bad terms as he alleged that his uncle tried to get him to take good on a promissory note (not unlike the one that is the basis for this post) to Samuel’s brother-in-law Jacob Weil, who was married to Jette Hellman.

In 1866, Herman left and, as pointed out by Hellman descendant Frances Dinkelspiel in her excellent Towers of Gold biography of Isaias, he deliberately took out adjacent and much larger advertisements in local newspapers. One, from the 29 June 1867 issue of the Wilmington Journal, successor to the Star, showed that, next to Samuel’s “Auction Store”, where auctions were conducted twice weekly at a new location at the junction of Main and Spring streets where Jonathan Temple’s 1848 two-story adobe stood, Herman, who was just a short distance south in the Temple Block, Herman added a snide note that there was “no connection with any Cheap JOHN trash house in Los Angeles.”

In 1867, F.P.F. Temple purchased the Temple Block property, including the brick building at the south end and the adobe structure at the north tip, and began a program of development that added three edifices over the next four years. The 25 September 1869 edition of the Los Angeles News contained an advertisement from Samuel announcing the “New Store and New Goods.”

The latter concerned a recent San Francisco purchasing expedition and the former involved opening in “Temple’s New Block,” with entrances from both Main and Spring streets. It was added that “for a short time only, we will continue our old store at the junction of Main and Spring street[s], and will close out our goods there at cost” with unsold inventory disposed of at auction.

Over the next several years, Hellman operated at that location, sometimes with partners like Samuel A. Widney and Robert H. Dalton, and often advertised new books received, holiday gift ideas, the “parlor kaleidoscope,” and stereoscopic photographs from local shutterbugs like William M. Godfrey, one of the earliest successful practitioners of the late 1860s and early 1870s. One such image in the Museum’s holdings included, on the reverse, a stamp showing that the stereoview was sold at the Hellman store.

He was also an assistant paymaster clerk for the local Union Army forces during the Civil War, an agent for a sewing machine company, for Bancroft’s “Map of the Pacific States,” and for a special non-corrosive pen, while the store also sold tickets to local events, such as the annual fair of the Southern District Agricultural Society, of which F.P.F. Temple was a founder and which was held at Agricultural (Exposition) Park. In the early 1870s, when La Crónica was founded as something of a descendant of El Clamor Público, Hellman advertised in it, including the promotion of new books for sale to those who read in Spanish.

In early 1876, just after the closure of the Temple and Workman bank as the local and state economy went into a tailspin during a period of national depression, Hellman advertised in the Los Angeles Express that he was closing out and offering “my entire stock of books, stationery and fancy articles to the public at reduced prices” as he intended to rent his store to another firm.

Later that year, Hellman, who’d been active in the regional real estate market in recent years, including the purchase of lots in the Woolen Mill Tract at the southwest portion of town, completed four frame dwellings on Third Street, between Main and Spring, in what was then a prime residential area (Thomas W. Temple, for example, built a fine house at Main and Third a few years prior.) If he was intending to focus on real estate, however, it appears the dour state of the economy led him back to the mercantile business and at the same location where he’d previously operated.

By 1880, he was back operating his book and stationery store, including in partnership with Otto A. Stassforth and the firm was known by their names. Two years later, Hellman’s son Maurice, a recent graduate of Los Angeles High School, joined in the enterprise. By mid-decade, Samuel retired and left Maurice and Stassforth to run the enterprise. In 1894, Maurice began working for Security Savings Bank with its president Joseph F. Sartori as his mentor—the younger Hellman rose to be vice-president and chair of the board of directors of the institution in a distinguished career.

With the heady days of the Boom of the Eighties undoubtedly helping Hellman’s financial picture improve mightily and as Los Angeles expanded significantly during the last few decades, Hellman moved his residence from the northwest corner of Main and Third street, where he built a commercial building in the early Nineties that was the local Wells Fargo express office as well as having other tenants, to a handsome Italianate dwelling at Fort (renamed Broadway in 1890) and Fourth streets. In 1895, soon after he moved to Main and Seventeenth, Hellman’s former residence was destroyed in a gas explosion and fire.

On Independence Day 1896, at age 60, Hellman died of an unspecified ailment, though the Express of that day and the Times of the next both indicated that it was not considered critical until just prior to his passing. Sadly, his wife, the former Adelaide Adler, whom he married in 1863 and their three daughters (Estelle, Camilla and Hortense) were traveling Europe at the time, leaving only Maurice (two others sons, Eugene and Arthur, died as small children) to be with Hellman in his final days.

Hellman, not nearly as wealthy as his cousins Isaias, who was one of the richest figures in the western United States, and Herman, left behind a substantial estate of about $175,000. He was not as well known as the other Hellmans or as his son, who remained a prominent figure until his death in 1943, but he was part of a family that was in the vanguard of early Jewish residents in Los Angeles and whose activities represent the opportunities, not available in Europe, to these emigres in the “New World.”