Aaron A. Rosenthal
(1863 Hornitos, CA - 23 Dec 1928 Portland, Oregon)
My Great Uncle
Part 1 1863-1899
Introduction
Very little is known of Aaron Rosenthal as far as his personality or activities. He lived most of his adult life (1884-1928) in Portland Oregon and worked as a clerk for several companies there. Why he went to Portland, I can only speculate. Perhaps he had relatives or friends who belonged to the Volga German community there. Perhaps he was a professional gambler (an honorable profession in those days) whose travels took him there. I have decided to follow Aaron by his timeline and addresses to get a picture of where he walked and what events he was aware through his life.
1870 Age: 7 Mariposa, California, United States ( Its name is Spanish for "butterfly", after the flocks of Monarchs seen over wintering there by early explorers.)
1870’s Age 7-17 Bodie, CA
1883 Age 18 Hawthorne, Nevada Uncertain if Aaron relocated with his family to Hawthorne. He was of age and may have remained in California when his family left California
Aaron’s father, Davis Rosenthal, built and operated this hotel in Hawthorne, Nevada
1884 Age: 21 Vernon, Mono, California, United States Clerk This town was washed out by an avalanche.
1885 Age: 22 32 Morrison, Portland, Oregon, USA City Fireman
1886 Age: 23 168 4th, Portland, Oregon, USA Supply Driver PPFD
The 1886 Abington Building was Portland’s first five-story building. Located on the east side of SW Third between Stark and Washington Streets, the Abington was flanked on the north by the Mckay building, and the Council Building on the south. It was demolished in 1967.
A view of Portland, Oregon in 1886 from the Jacob Kamm House.
First Street in Portland, Oregon from The West Shore
The railroad depot in Portland, Oregon from The West Shore in 1886
Portland Chinatown 1886
This color lithograph accompanied an article titled “A Night in Chinatown” in the October 1886 issue of West Shore, a Portland news and literary magazine.
Several thousand Chinese lived in Portland in the 1880s, most of them unmarried men who plied a variety of occupations, as depicted in this illustration. Most lived in two enclaves: an urban Chinatown which extended along what is today SW 2nd Avenue between Taylor and Pine streets, and a community of vegetable gardeners who lived and farmed along the banks of Tanner Creek in the vicinity of SW 19th and W Burnside and PGE Park.
The urban Chinatown consisted of retail shops, residential apartments, temples, and meeting and gaming rooms that occupied buildings leased from white landlords. The See Wa & Company building, built in 1882, is an ordinary three-story commercial building with modest Italianate detailing, such as the arched entries on the first floor, probably with cast iron columns, and the similarly arched windows above. But the tenants have added a number of touches, such as the two exterior balconies, the curved metal awning on the third level, the pennant and lanterns. The round windows are very unusual, and may be adaptations as well. Balconies were a common marker of Chinese quarters in cities and towns. One extant example in Portland, the Waldo Block at SW 2nd Avenue and Washington Street, has a recessed balcony that was added to the third floor of the 1886 Italianate commercial block in 1920. Chinese tenants also frequently altered interiors, adding rooms, half-stories, and passageways to make intensive use of the space.
The buildings in the Tanner Creek gardens area were vernacular wooden dwellings built by the Chinese. They were “apparently near exact duplicates of the pitched-roof, simple wooden structures that were and are a part of rural Chinese buildings,” according to historian Marie Rose Wong. “The combination of broad overhangs on houses built close to one another created covered walkways, a useful feature during Portland’s rainy winter months. Without the obvious Asian motifs and decorative colors, however, Portland society dismissed the community as nothing more than a slum.” The gardens gave way to development early in the twentieth century. Much of downtown Chinatown migrated north in the 1920s and 1930s, adjacent to the area known as Nihonmachi or Japantown, and generally then known as the North End. Today the distinctive balconies and colors persist in a neighborhood labeled Old Town.
1887 Age: 24 168 4th, Portland, Oregon, USA Supply Driver PPFD
An image of the brand-new Steel Bridge in 1887. This image may actually have been drawn from plans before the bridge was in operation. This bridge lasted less than 30 years before it was torn down and replaced with the Steel Bridge we know today.
A two-page spread showing the Portland waterfront as it appeared in 1887,
1888 Age: 25 168 4th, Portland, Oregon, USA Journalist
Below are the newspapers operating in Portland during the time that Aaron was a journalist. Do not know which one he worked for or maybee he was a freelance. His brother Samuel H Rosenthal was a journalist and also started a newpaper while in Hawthorne, Nevada.
Evening Telegram
Portland Daily News
Portland Weekly News
1889 Age: 26 168 4th, Portland, Oregon, USA Journalist
Postcard depicting the 1889 Temple Beth Israel synagogue, which was destroyed by fire in December 1923
1890 Age 27 Portland, Oregon, USA
Cable cars appeared in Portland in January of 1890. The first line ran from Irving Street, near Union Station, along 5th to Jefferson Street and along Jefferson past the Vista Bridge into Washington Park (formerly City Park). It had a sideline from 5th and Alder to Front Street and another at Southwest 18th up to Spring Street. On the Spring Street segment, lay the line’s most impressive element, a trestle spanning one thousand feet.
The line opened on February 22, 1890 after operators received a brief training from San Francisco workers. The first accident on the line occurred just two days later. When the car gained speed unexpectedly, the freshly trained crew jumped from the car in panic, leaving the three passengers to fend for themselves. Luckily, the passengers escaped with only minor injuries. Like horse drawn cars, the cable cars could operate in flood conditions, something that the electric cars, that eventually replaced them, could not do.
Portland Harbor in the 1890s: This hand-tinted postcard image of the Portland waterfront just after the turn of the century does not appear on the front cover, but is a good overview of the more "respectable" end of the waterfront. Notice the wharves and warehouses have false fronts on them, facing Front Street.
1891 Age 28 Portland, Oregon, USA
Central Library in 1891
Portland Cable Railway, 1891
The Portland Cable Railway Co. operated this cable car trestle as part of their overall Portland Heights line in the 1890s. The wooden trestle ran from the powershop at SW 18th & Mill (now under US26 just east of the tunnels) south up the hill to 18th & probably Jackson St. in Portland Heights. From there it traveled up 18th to Spring St. Power lines essentially trace the route today. The house at right center in this photo still exists; it’s the 1891 Alice Druhot house on SW Cable St., a block to the west of the trestle.
1892 Age 29 Portland, Oregon, USA
Portland Oregon 1892 Panoramic View
1893 Age 30 Portland, Oregon, USA
Aaron Rosenthal who was a clerk of cigar and liquor stores was no doubt awake of this strange story.
Vienna, March 5, 1893 – Three baby farmers were arrested as Przemysi yesterday through the suspicious death of the daughter of a Government official who had been kept secluded for several days at the houses of one of the midwives. On Friday the woman was placed under surveillance and the back yard of her house was dug over. The bodies of twenty-seven very young infants were found in cigar boxes a few inches beneath the surfaces. A similar investigation of the premises of these two resulted in the discovery of the skeletons of 19 infants. The women confessed, but said that if arraigned they would shake the city with their revelations.
[“Wholesale Infanticide. – Terrible Revelations of an Austrian Baby-Farm – Dozens of Bodies Found by the Authorities – Social Scandals Threatened.” The Toronto Daily Mail (Canada), Mar. 6, 1893, p. 1]
Finck's 1893 Cigars
1894 Age 31 Portland, Oregon, USA
Flood scene at Front and Morrison, 1894
1895 Age 32 Portland, Oregon, USA
Mark Twain in Portland
A world tour was not Samuel Clemens's first choice as a way to spend his golden years, but financial misfortune had made one a necessity. His publishing house, Webster and Company, failed in 1894 and his large investments in the Paige Compositor typesetting machine evaporated when the complex apparatus was made obsolete by the Linotype. A series of lecture engagements to span the globe was seen as a way to recoup some of his losses and pay off his creditors. It was under those circumstances that Mark Twain, sixty years old and in poor health, appeared at the Marquam Grand Opera House on Friday, August 9 1895.
He arrived at the nearly completed Union Station from Tacoma that evening with his manager, Major James B. Pond ("Pon" to Twain). His wife, daughter and the rest of his traveling companions had elected to stay behind in Washington. The night was warm, with the smell of smoke from distant forest fires in the air. He was shuttled from the station by coach on 6th Street to the Marquam Grand, where a standing room only crowd waited.
The Marquam Grand (left) where Twain appeared, and the Hotel Portland (right) where he stayed on August 9 1895.
Portlanders had flocked to the city's most opulent venue to see the noted humorist, whose reputation as a speaker nearly exceeded his as an author.
"With rare versatility, Mark Twain not only excels with his pen, but is equally at home on the platform, and captivates his audiences by the dry, droll, almost apathetic manner of which he brings out the wit and humor of his own productions." -The Oregonian, August 4 1895.
R.W. Mitchell, who had known Twain a quarter century before, wrote the Oregonian on August 7 1895:
"Mark Twain is greater today than he was 25 years ago. His fame is more permanent, and stands more prominently out, now that his fortune is gone. Reading him is good. Hearing him is 50 per cent better. It was the same way with Dickens."
Mark Twain at the Marquam Grand Opera House.
-The Sunday Oregonian, August 11 1895.
-The Sunday Oregonian, August 11 1895.
Twain took to the stage in front of the "very fashionable and extremely large" audience. His loosely structured monologue featured excerpts from My First Theft, The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, The Character of the Bluejay, A Fancy Dress Incident, A Bit More than He Could Chew, Tom Sawyer's Crusade,Fighting a Duel in Nevada and A Ghost Story, interspersed with digressions and improvisations. The audience was in high spirits, punctuating Twain's droll delivery with laughter. After an hour and a half, he left the stage, but was called back by the crowd for a rendition ofThe Stammer's Tale.
"...at its close the lecturer took occasion to thank his hearers for such a cordial reception on a summer evening, and expressed his sincere gratification that his meeting with the public of Portland was of such a substantial and pleasing character." -The Oregonian, August 10 1895.
The Arlington Club at Alder and West Park, its home from 1892 to 1910.
After the show, Mark Twain and his entourage proceeded two blocks west to the Arlington Club for a dinner hosted by Twain's long time friend, Charles Erskine Scott Wood, where he held court with some two dozen of Portland's Haut Ton set. He then retired to the Portland Hotel.
Portland attorney and author Charles Erskine Scott Wood was a long time friend of Samuel Clemens. In 1882, while assigned to West Point as an aid-decamp to General O.O. Howard, C.E.S. Wood helped facilitate the anonymous publication of Twain's ribald farce "1601". Twain would later write of the work" "if there is a decent word findable in it, it is because I overlooked it".
L.L. Hawkins at the reins, outside the Portland Hotel on June 18 1895, three weeks before Mark Twain departed there for Union Station. -City of Portland Archives
The following morning, Twain, wearing a blue nautical cap, stood outside the Portland Hotel as his bags were loaded into the coach to take him to Union Station.
"Dozens of people came up to reach over the array of handbags and shake hands with Mark Twain. Most of them claimed to have met him before, and his face wore a rather puzzled look sometimes as he was reminded of the various places and occasions where he had met them in days gone by." -The Sunday Oregonian, August 11 1895.
When the bags were loaded, Twain, Major Pond and the Oregonian's reporter boarded his coach for Union Station. As they rode down 6th Street he commented to the reporter:
"Portland seems to be a pretty nice town and this is a pretty nice smooth street. Now Portland aught to lay itself out a little and macadamize all the streets like this. Then it aught to own all the bicycles and rent 'em out and so pay for the streets. Pretty good scheme eh? I suppose people would complain about monopoly, but then we have monopolies always with us. Now in European cities, you know, the government runs a whole lot of things, and, runs 'em pretty well. Here many folks seem to be alarmed by government monopolies, but I don't see why. Here cities give away for nothing franchises for car lines, electric plants and things like that. Their generosity is often astounding. The American people take the yoke of private monopoly with philosophical indifference, and I don't see why they should mind a little government monopoly."
The conversation continued about Twain's next book of travel writing.
"It will be a lazy man's book. If anyone picks it up expecting to find full data, historical, topographical, and so forth, he will be disappointed. A lazy man, you know, don't rush around with his note book as soon as he lands on a foreign shore. He simply drifts about, and if anything gets in his way of sufficient interest, it goes into his book."
The newly completed Union Station, circa 1896.
Twain left the coach and entered the temporary station facilities with Major Pond and the reporter from the Oregonian in tow. Noticing the finishing touches being applied to the new depot he inquired:
"There must be some reason why a town like Portland has not long since built a new depot. What is the reason?"
The reporter explained that tow of the railroads serving it had passed into receivership, which delayed construction (a major depot had been planned for Portland since 1883).
Twain concluded his interview in the smoking compartment of the Olympia car. He noted that, in novels, characters are drawn and re-combined from memory:
"We mortals can't create, we can only copy. Some copies are good and some are bad."
He bid farewell as the train prepared to depart.
"Well, I haven't had an opportunity to see much of Portland, because, through the diabolical machinations of Major Pond over there, I am compelled to leave it after but a glimpse. I may never see Portland again, but I liked the glimpse."
Mark Twain at Union Station, from the Sunday Oregonian, August 11 1895.
Twain continued the Northwest leg of his tour with appearances at Olympia, Seattle, Victoria and Vancouver before departing for Australia. He would recall his sojourn in the region in his "lazy man's book" published two years later.
"It was warm work, all the way, and the last fortnight of it was suffocatingly smokey, for in Oregon and British Columbia the forest fires were raging." -Following the Equator, a Journey Around the World, by Mark Twain.
The world tour was a success and within three years he would be out of debt. Despite his ill health on tour, Mark Twain lived for fifteen years after his Portland appearance.
1896 Age: 33 Cambridge Building, Portland, Oregon, USA Clerk for J D Meyers, cigars & liquor
The Cambridge Block was built in 1884 by Henry W. Corbett for $75,000. Architect Warren H. Williams incorporated many cast-iron design features from other Portland buildings, including Cooks’ Block. The Cambridge Block stood on the southwest corner of SW 3rd and Morrison until its demolition in 1962. You can find Pioneer Place there now. (Cambridge Block, 1955)
Great Plank Road
This is Canyon Road in 1896. This is the road that made Portland the most important city in the northwest. You can see the level of improvement was very small. Today, this route is the Sunset Freeway.
1897 Age: 34 Cambridge Building, Portland, Oregon, USA Clerk for J D Meyers
Fred Meyer's original store in downtown Portland
The Klondike gold rush of 1897 attracted many Portlanders and Oregonians and it would be a powerful element in the life of Esther Clayson Pohl and her family.
Esther Clayson Pohl's husband and medical partner Emil Pohl and her brother Fred Clayson were on the first voyage of the steamship George W. Elder, the first ship to leave Portland for the gold fields. They sailed on July 30, 1897 from Portland to Skagway, Alaska. Also on board was Portland physician Andrew C. Smith. Henry Coe, editor of the Medical Sentinel, assured readers that Dr. Smith was already the "owner of some valuable gold mines and is able to give this question a dispassionate investigation."
"Dispassionate" would hardly describe the rest of the enterprise. The gold rush was front page news in the Oregonian for weeks and the paper published news of the "Argonauts" preparing to sail with anecdotes, estimates of tonnage, and (to the everlasting gratitude of historians) passenger lists. The paper even covered a going away party Dr. Curtis Holcomb threw for the "Albina Boys" the night before the George W. Elder sailed, toasts and all.
This illustration accompanied the story of the sailing on the front page of the Oregonian for July 30, 1897. Hundreds gathered on the Ainsworth dock of the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company to send off 400 "Argonauts" including six women, 150 horses, dozens of dogs and 450 tons of equipment. It was, the reporter rhapsodized, "the most stirring and romantic incident of the kind in the history of staid old Portland."
1898 Age: 35 28 Cambridge Building, Portland, Oregon, USA Rosenthal &
Budd
Budd
FIRST AUTOMOBILE SOLD ON THIS DAY IN 1898
From Scientific American Magazine, 1898
The Winton Automobile
The Winton Motor Carriage Company was one of the first American companies to sell a motor car. On March 24, 1898, 70 year old Robert Allison of Port Carbon, Pennsylvania became the first person to buy a Winton after seeing the first ad for a automobile in Scientific American magazine. The company later bought the car back and donated it to the Smithsonian Museum in 1929.
1899 Age: 36 28 Cambridge Building, Portland, Oregon, USA Rosenthal & Budd
1899, Weymouth; The Mysterious Disappearance of the Train Driver
At one time in Weymouth there existed a railway line that ran from Weymouth station, across an iron girder bridge over the large stretch of water known as the Backwater and on to Portland. (Virtually where the new road bridge now sits.)
In the year 1899 came a report in the newspapers of the rather mysterious dissapearance of a train driver…now this at first doesn’t seem too startling, but if I explain that the chap was supposed to be driving the train at the time… well, you get my drift.
On the 18th December 1899, 33-year old Percy Frank Nutman was the driver in charge of the Great Western train on it’s way from Weymouth to Portland. It seems that as the train was setting out on its journey, and was slowly crossing the bridge over the Backwater, he just vanished!…
Luckily, also on board was 18-year-old Frank William Willis, he had only recently started working with the Great Western, he in fact, had only a couple of weeks prior, started work as a fire-man (to those not of the ‘steam age’, it’s the man who shovels the coal into the boiler).
As correct railway procedure was to blow the whistle when coming up to the Littlefied crossing once over the lake, when Frank Willias didn’t hear the familiar sound, he realised something was up..turning round , he found he was alone…completely alone…the driver, Percy Nutman had simply vanished!
The young lad, keeping a cool head managed to bring the train to a halt at the Rodwell station, the next on the line.
By now, everone was assuming that Nutman had dropped or fallen into the Backwater. All that was found was his hat which was laying on the ballast track over the railway bridge. A thorough search was made for the missing man along the length of the track, through the surrounding countryside, in case he’d stumbled off somewhere injured. They even went as far as to drag the lake time and time again over the next month searching for his body. Not a sign to be seen of his carcass.
His wife offered a £5 reward for the return of his body.
Once all avenues had been explored, it was assumed that he had died, and at some stage that his rotting remains would float to the surface somewhere in the Backwater or harbour.
Mrs Nutman donned her widow’s weeds, relatives gathered to commiserate her loss. She was even in the process of suing the Great Western Railway under the Employer’s Liability Act for the loss of her husbands body.
The widow and her 3 children had been left destitute, what was worse, she was expecting a 4th child before long. They were now all on parish relief, trying to keep house and home together.
It the February of the following year, Percy’s wife, Mary, had received a letter from an acquaintance who said that they had spotted him in Shepton Mallet. Suspicions aroused, and not totally convinced of his manner of death, the detective department of the GWR, namely Chief Inspector Benton, dug a little deeper…and they finally got their man
Naughty Mr Nutman though was very much alive, hale and hearty!
He had deliberately faked his death to escape his married life at home in Weymouth, he was finally found with living with his sister-in-law (who he had made pregnant while still with his wife!) in Leatherhead, Surrey.
Percy Frank Nutman, aged 33, was brought before the Dorchester Quater session and indicted for “unlawfully and willfully leaving an engine, belonging to the GWR co., whereby the lives and limbs of the persons then passing along the Weymouth and Portland Railway might have been endangered.”
When he arrived back by train to Weymouth for his court case he was met by a ‘lively reception’ a crowd of 300 odd men, women and children were there to greet him, though it probably wasn’t the sort of greeting that one would wish for. The crowd being so hostile towards Nutman, he was soon hustled off to the lock-up.
Appearing in court on the 4th July 1900, for jumping ship (or rather ‘train’) Percy Frank Nutman received a sentence of 6 months hard labour.
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