Segerstrom family collection, 1910-1975

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Summary

Creators:
Segerstrom, Charles Homer, 1910-1979
Abstract:
The Segerstrom Collection contains a nearly complete run of all correspondence and financial reports relating to the operation of each of Charles Segerstrom's hotel properties. The Collection contains correspondence and company records related to several business activities of the Segerstrom family, including: mining, hotels, lumber, railroad, and banking interests.
Extent:
230 linear feet
Language:
English.

Background

Scope and content:

The Segerstrom Collection contains a nearly complete run of all correspondence and financial reports relating to the operation of each of Charles Segerstrom's hotel properties. The Collection contains correspondence and company records related to several business activities of the Segerstrom family, including: mining, hotels, lumber, railroad, and banking interests.

Biographical / historical:

Two generations of the Segerstrom family of Sonora, California were important players in the mining history of the southern Mother Lode and central Nevada (1910-1975). Their extensive papers depict a complex history of personal investments and mining developments in these and other mining districts of the west from Canada to Mexico. The family were also bankers, first in Tuolumne County (1914-1930) then throughout California (c1955-1975), and hoteliers, operating several establishments in San Francisco, Chico and Sonora (c1930-1955). Various members of the Segerstrom family were prominent in local civic affairs and national Republican politics. All of these components of Segerstrom family activity are represented in this collection, which includes business papers of Charles H. Segerstrom, Charles H. Segerstrom Jr. and Donald Segerstrom.

Charles Homer Segerstrom (1880-1946), a native of Sweden and the second of eleven children, immigrated with his parents to Minnesota as an infant. Following a family move to southern California (1895), Segerstrom enrolled at the University of Southern California, graduating with a Bachelor of Law degree in 1903. He subsequently purchased Sonora Abstract and Title, operating this business until he purchased the Dutch Mine in 1909. Segerstrom was also chief executive officer of the Carson Hill Gold Mining Corporation, the Westside Lumber Company, the Nevada Massachusetts Mining Company, Incorporated, the Pacific Tungsten Company, and other mining corporations (1924-1946). For a time he was director of the American Mining Congress.

As a banker, Charles Segerstrom was associated with the 1st National Bank of Sonora and the Tuolumne County Bank as Vice President (1914-1930) and Cashier until the Bank of Italy acquired them. He was a member of the executive committee of the California Bankers Association (1925-1946), and president of the Independent League of California Bankers (1925-1929). Charles Segerstrom was involved with civic affairs through Republican politics, community and organization service work, and as an hotelier. In 1940 he chaired the California delegation to the Republican National Convention and gave a nominating address for Wendell L. Wilkie. He was a trustee of the College of the Pacific and a member of the association council of Mills College. He was chairman of the Tuolumne County Liberty Loan and War Savings program during World War II. He was also a member of the Sonora High School board for twenty-five years. He operated the Hotel Maurice, the Drake Wiltshire and the Canterbury Hotel in San Francisco, the Oaks Hotel in Chico, and the Sonora Inn (c1930-1946).

Charles Segerstrom at one time owned as many as three hotels in San Francisco, one in Sonora, and one in Chico. He began to acquire these properties in the late 1920s and still owned most of them at his death in 1946. None of the hotels were ever a dependable money-maker. The Great Depression naturally caused a long-term slump in tourism that hurt the California hotel business, but Segerstrom was also plagued by employee problems. After his death the family gradually liquidated these holdings when it was prudent to do so.

Important names in Charles Segerstrom's hotel business were: Brace A. Eldred, his accountant for more than twenty-five years; Mrs. H.H. Mansfield, his publicist; and, George H. Thompson, co-investor and manager of his San Francisco hotels during the latter half of the 1930s. Eldred and Mansfield were loyal employees who maintained a voluminous, informative correspondence with their employer throughout the 1930s and 1940s. George Thompson played a less positive role. An ambitious man, with hotels of his own, Thompson evidently thought to "con" Segerstrom out of his San Francisco properties by running them into debt and then buying them at a discount. After considerable warning from Eldred and others, Charles Segerstrom had Thompson investigated, and finding that he was probably pilfering hotel furnishings and siphoning them off to his own properties, bought him out by giving him sole rights to the Drake-Wiltshire Hotel in 1941 in exchange for a substantial yearly cash payment.

Segerstrom first purchased the Hotel Oaks in Chico in 1925. He traded it together with $170,000 to George D. Smith, who had built the Canterbury in 1923, and was soon to erect the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco, for rights to the Canterbury at a time when Smith needed cash to finance the Mark Hopkins. Sometime later Segerstrom resumed ownership in Chico. The history of the Hotel Oaks was probably the least turbulent of all Segerstrom's hotel properties. Chico was never a major tourist market, but the presence of a college in the isolated valley community guaranteed a steady, though modest, flow of patrons. The one negative event in the hotel's forty-five year history was a fire in 1946. Twenty years after Segerstrom's death his family had the Hotel Oaks torn down (1965) and subsequently operated the property as a parking lot for almost fifteen years before selling out to the M&T Co. in 1979. The Oaks was the first and last Segerstrom hotel property.

The Sonora Inn, in Segerstrom's home town, served both as convenient lodging for businessmen and employees who had affairs to negotiate with their host, and as a base for touring the ski areas and historic sites further "up the hill" in the southern Sierra. Like the Hotel Oaks, the Inn had a relatively tranquil existence from the time Segerstrom acquired it in 1935 to the time the family sold it in 1953. Coincidentally the Sonora Inn also experienced a small fire in the same year as that at the Oaks (1946).

Charles Segerstrom's first San Francisco hotel acquisition was the Hotel Canterbury at 750 Sutter Street in 1927. He later purchased controlling interests in the Maurice Hotel in 1935 and the Drake-Wiltshire on Union Square in 1936. George Thompson managed these properties from 1935. Both the Canterbury and the Maurice were distinguished by ornamental murals that were the work of California artist Jo Mora. The Canterbury was advertised as "the only downtown hotel with a garden." As noted earlier, Segerstrom ceded control of the Drake-Wiltshire to Thompson after only five years (1941). He may have done this largely to be rid of Thompson, since that hotel, due in part to its location in the heart of the city's finest shopping district, was probably his most lucrative hotel investment. Segerstrom sold the least profitable of his three San Francisco hotels, the Maurice, in 1944. The family operated the Hotel Canterbury for six years after Charles Sr.'s death, finally selling it to hotelier Louis Lurie for a million dollars in 1959.

Arrangement:

Series 1: Maps; Mining Diagrams; Architect's Drawings Series 2: General and Personal Correspondence Series 3: Mining Papers Series 4: Hotels Series 5: Properties and Estates Series 6: Lumber, Railroads, and Banking Series 7: Politics and Public Life

Physical location:
For current information on the location of these materials, please consult the library's online catalog.
Rules or conventions:
Finding aid prepared using Describing Archives: a Content Standard

Access and use

Location of this collection:
University of the Pacific, Holt-Atherton Department of Special Collections, University Library
Stockton, CA 95211, US
Contact:
(209) 946-2404
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