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 CHARLES CROCKER


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BRIEF BIOGRAPHY: __//** Charles Crocker was born on September 16, 1822, in Troy, New York to a family of meager finances. Because of the problems with money, Crocker helped support his family as soon as he was able, therefore limiting his opportunity to receive and education. Despite his boundaries, Crocker soon learned to read. He read anything and everything that he could, which included the newspapers that he sold. Reading those increased his knowledge in the stock market which would later help him. Eventually, he started his own news agency in Troy, New York. It became profitable, enough so that he saved adequate funds to buy his parents a farm in Indiana.  He moved there with his father and helped on the farm. Soon afterwards, his mother died. Crocker went to work on a nearby farm, and then to a sawmill. While at the sawmill, he took advantage of the opportunity to become a little more educated. He then took up an apprenticeship at an iron forge. He learned the trade of the making or bar iron. He was proficient at it, so when a deposit of it was discovered nearby, he took control of it and built a forge. He built it in partnership with the man who taught him the trade.  Later on, the news of the gold rush in California came to him. He “caught the fever” and decided to go. He sold his part of the iron business and began preparations, but the iron forge was burnt to the ground, soon thereafter. He immediately built it again and sold it.  In the spring of 1850, he started the trip to California. His mining was neither unsuccessful nor extremely successful, so he opened up a goods store in the town of Sacramento in the spring of 1852. That business made him one of the richest men in the city. He was elected to city council in 1855 and to the state legislature in 1860.  In 1861, he and his colleagues Mark Hopkins, Collis Huntington and Leland Stanford (the Big Four) heard an interesting speech delivered by Theodore Judah, invested in the construction of the Central Pacific Railroad. Crocker created Charles Crocker and Co., mainly for the purpose of building the railroad. By using Chinese laborers because of the shortage of manpower, Crocker got the job done seven years before the government deadline.  After the railroad, Crocker got involved in banking. He got a controlling interest in Woolworth National Bank for his son, William. The bank then became Crocker- Anglo Bank, then Crocker-Citizens Bank when it joined with Los Angeles’ National Bank, and finally Crocker Bank. But, the bank no longer exists because it was taken over by Wells Fargo Bank in 1986.  In 1886, Charles Crocker was seriously injured in a carriage accident. Two years later, he died and was buried in Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, California.    I have only found two examples that make my mind lean towards captain of industry, and those were that he completed the railroad seven years ahead of schedule, and he bought his parents a farm. And it seems that the only reason he got the job done seven years faster was that he used Chinese immigrants who were desperate enough to work sixteen hour days that were full of back-breaking labor, for little pay.  It was said that when there were inspections on the railroad, he would show them the best constructed chunks of the track, and would fly over the poorly fabricated ones, in order to fool them into giving a good review. I could find no archetypes that stated that Crocker ever donated his money. Therefore, I came to the conclusion that Charles Crocker was a robber baron.  Charles Crocker; Wikipedia; www.wikipedia.org/CharlesCrocker; February 21, 2008 . <span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Footlight MT Light','serif'"> <span style="FONT-FAMILY: 'Footlight MT Light','serif'">Clark, S.j. __San Francisco: Its Builders, Past and Present : Pictorial and Biographical__. Clark (S.J.) Company, 1913. 75-77 <span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Footlight MT Light','serif'">
 * //__<span style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; LINE-HEIGHT: 115%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Footlight MT Light','serif'">Captain of Industry, or Robber Baron? __//**
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