We've often said that the real winners of the California Gold Rush were not the gold prospectors, but those who sold goods and services to the prospectors and miners. That was certainly the case for 14-year-old James Folger, who arrived in California in 1850 with his older brothers Henry and Edward. James was ready to jump at an opportunity, which in his case, took the form of coffee.
By the time they reached the West Coast, they were nearly broke. James agreed to earn money in the city while his older brothers traveled north to pan for gold. James had worked as a carpenter since he was 11, so it was a natural move for him to take a job with William H. Bovee, a 27- year-old transplanted New Yorker who wanted to create a spice and coffee mill. They decided to build it in the heart of San Francisco, just six blocks from the waterfront. James constructed the first wind-powered mill using sails from whaling ships abandoned in the harbor by sailors eager to get to the goldfields. Bovee’s company became the Pioneer Steam Coffee and Spice Mills.
Bovee had run a coffee-roasting business in New York; even there, pre-roasted coffee had been a luxury. Since the mining country offered a huge potential market for men desperate to get easy-to-fix coffee, he figured he and young James were the men to supply it. James traveled to the goldfields in 1851, carrying samples of Pioneer Coffee, sealed in tins. He managed to make one major strike, which provided him with enough capital to set up a country store at a camp called Yankee Jim’s.
Four years later, 18-year-old James sold the store for a profit, returned to San Francisco and resumed his role as a partner in Pioneer Mills. In 1859 Bovee sold his interest in the coffee company to James, who bought out the other partners and renamed the firm the James A. Folger Company.
Read the rest of that story, and also how John Arbuckle Jr. made a name for himself providing coffee to cowboys in Texas and the Southwest during the rise of the cattle industry, at HistoryNet. -Thanks, WTM!
(Image credit: JA Folger Co.)
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