1999’s Keepsake: San Francisco in the Early 1850s
Benjamin Wingate |
The 1999 Bancroft Keepsake will provide a rare opportunity to share a select and intimate view of life in San Francisco during the early 1850s.
The volume, to be published in June, will draw from the library’s rich pictorial and manuscript resources. G. R. Fardon’s photographs of early buildings and streets, lithographs and wood blocks from letter sheets, and the letters of Benjamin Wingate, resident bookkeeper, will combine to reveal a city in the violent pangs of birth as it created its own particular,conflicted sense of identity.
G. R. Fardon’s San Francisco Album, first published in 1856, is one of the earliest existing series of views of any American or European city. Among the album’s 33 photographs are pictures of Battery, Montgomery, Kearny, Sacramento, and California streets; views of the city’s first architectural monuments, including City Hall, St. Mary’s Church, and the Custom House; and perspectives of Telegraph Hill, Rincon Point, and Alcatraz. The Keepsake will incorporate several images from Bancroft’s copy of this rare and valuable album.
The library’s collection of letter sheets — lithographs or wood blocks on writing paper — will provide the volume with another kind of view. Between 1849 and 1869, the popular letter sheet provided the major visual account of life and events in San Francisco, including frequent devastating fires and, for a time, public lynchings by vigilantes.
Interspersed among the photographs and letter sheets will be Benjamin Wingate’s eye-witness account of early San Francisco. The Wingate correspondence (1851-1855) between Benjamin in San Francisco and his wife, Mary, and their five children in New Hampshire, was acquired by the Bancroft in 1985 (see (Bancroftania, No. 92). Its almost complete exchange of letters is a rarity among Gold Rush correspondence.
The Miner’s Exchange Bank on the west side of Montgomery Street at Jackson. Photographed by G.R. Fardon, ca. 1855. |
Wingate worked as a bookkeeper for a shipping company on the wharves and lived a relatively stable life in a series of respectable boarding houses. Over four years he wrote nearly 100 letters to his wife, often describing the city and its evolution. In a letter dated Oct. 14, 1851, he writes:
“Since the rebuilding of the city, it has a most singular appearance. A part of the buildings are of the most massive kind, constructed of brick or stone, with walls two feet thick, and heavy iron doors & shutters. By the side of these stand wooden structures of the lightest and cheapest materials. The idea is, either to build fire-proof, or else so that a fire would burn out in the shortest time, and with the least loss.”
Fires, new construction, crime and vigilantes, the frequent and massive arrival by ship of different ethnic and national groups, economic surges and depressions, the emergence of agriculture, parades and celebrations — each capture Wingate’s attention and analysis, which he faithfully transmits to his wife.
The poise of Fardon’s photographs and Wingate’s simple, elegant prose, including responses from his wife and children, as they will be commemorated in this new Keepsake, will provide remarkable and complementary portals to the creation of this first major western American city.
Stephen Vincent chairs the
Friends Publications Committee
and is Editor of the 1999 Keepsake.
Volume 114
Spring 1999
Table of Contents
Bancroft Launches Bioscience Program with Stellar Symposium March 12–13
From the Director: Just what is it that you do, exactly?
The Business of the Humanities The “Trade”— what it is and how Bancroft uses it
The Thrill of the Chase Or, How the Biography of Poet Jack Spicer Came To Be
“The Times, They Are a’ Changin’” Bancroft Launches Free Speech Movement Archive
The Many Uses of Bancroft Collections
Joseph Esherick’s Oral History Illuminates an Architectural Icon
Where Do You “Find” Mark Twain’s Letters?
1999’s Keepsake: San Francisco in the Early 1850s
Bancroft Fellows Research Women and Space, Tobacco and Chocolate
