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Title: Segerstrom family collection
Dates: 1910-1975
Collection number: Mss275
Creator:
Segerstrom, Charles Homer,
1910-1979
Collection Size: 230 linear feet
Repository:
University of the Pacific. Library. Holt-Atherton Dept. of
Special Collections
Stockton, California 95211
Shelf location: For current information on the location of
these materials, please consult the library's online catalog.
Language: English.
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.
Collection is open for research.
[Identification of item], Segerstrom Family Collection, Mss275,
Holt-Atherton Department of Special Collections, University of the Pacific
Library
Permission for publication is given on behalf of Special Collections as
the owner of the physical items and is not intended to include or imply
permission of the copyright holder, which must also be obtained by the
researcher.
Biography / Administrative History
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.
Scope and Content of Collection
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.
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
The following terms have been used to index the description of this
collection in the library's online public access catalog.
Segerstrom, Charles Homer,
1880-1946
Hotels - California
Logging - California
Pickering Lumber Company
Sierra Railroad
Railroads - California
Banks and banking - California -
History