Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853-1913. Harris Newmark
SIXTY YEARS
IN
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
CHAPTER I
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH
1834–1853
I was born in Loebau, West Prussia, on the 5th of July, 1834, the son of Philipp and Esther, née Meyer, Neumark; and I have reason to believe that I was not a very welcome guest. My parents, who were poor, already had five children, and the prospects of properly supporting the sixth child were not bright. As I had put in an appearance, however, and there was no alternative, I was admitted with good grace into the family circle and, being the baby, soon became the pet.
My father was born in the ancient town of Neumark; and in his youth he was apprenticed to a dealer in boots and shoes in a Russian village through which Napoleon Bonaparte marched on his way to Moscow. The conqueror sent to the shop for a pair of fur boots, and I have often heard my father tell, with modest satisfaction, how, shortly before he visited the great fair at Nijni Novgorod, he was selected to deliver them; how more than one ambitious and inquisitive friend tried to purchase the privilege of approaching the great man, and what were his impressions of the warrior. When ushered into the august presence, he found Bonaparte in one of his characteristic postures, standing erect, in a meditative mood, braced against the wall, with one hand to his forehead and the other behind his back, apparently absorbed in deep and anxious thought.
When I was but three weeks old, my father's business affairs called him away from home, and compelled the sacrifice of a more or less continued absence of eight and one half years. During this period my mother's health was very poor. Unfortunately, also, my father was too liberal and extravagantly-inclined for his narrow circumstances; and not being equipped to meet the conditions of the district in which we lived and our economical necessities, we were continually, so to speak, in financial hot water. While he was absent, my father traveled in Sweden and Denmark, remitting regularly to his family as much as his means would permit, yet earning for them but a precarious living. In 1842 he again joined his family in Loebau, making visits to Sweden and Denmark during the summer seasons from 1843 until the middle fifties and spending the long winters at home. Loebau was then, as now, of little commercial importance, and until 1849, when I was fifteen years of age and had my first introduction to the world, my life was very commonplace and marked by little worthy of special record, unless it was the commotion centering in the cobble-paved market-place, as a result of the Revolution of 1848.
With the winter of 1837 had come a change in my father's plans and enterprises. Undergoing unusually severe weather in Scandinavia, he listened to the lure of the New World and embarked for New York, arriving there in the very hot summer of 1838. The contrast in climatic conditions proved most disastrous; for, although life in the new Republic seemed both pleasing and acceptable to one of his temperament and liberal views, illness finally compelled him to bid America adieu.
Facsimile of a Part of the MS.
"Note.—The 'F' in the above announcement is the abbreviation for Fabian, one of Philipp Neumark's given names, at one time used in business, but seldom employed in social correspondence, and finally abandoned altogether."
My father was engaged in the making of ink and blacking, neither of which commodities was, at that time, in such universal demand as it is now; and my brother, Joseph Philipp, later known as J. P. Newmark, having some time before left Sweden, where he had been assisting him, for England, it was agreed, in 1849, after a family council, that I was old enough to accompany my father on his business trips,