Jacob Friedrich Schoellkopf:Master Entrepreneur & Family Patriarch
By Richard G. Waite
Jacob Frederick Schoellkopf, ca. 1885.Credit- Deutsches Museum
Jacob Friedrich Schoellkopf was one of 19th century Western New York’s greatest entrepreneurs. An immigrant to Buffalo’s German community in 1844, Schoellkopf rose to such prominence in Western New York’s business community that some would admiringly call him “King Jacob.” His achievements included major successes in the traditional enterprises of leather tanning and flour milling while also attaining pioneering advances in the chemical and electrical industries of the newly-emerging Second American Scientific Revolution. While obviously a busy man, Jacob remained faithfully married to Christine Durr, and the pair raised seven children to be contributing members of the Niagara Frontier’s social and business communities and active partners in the Schoellkopf business empire.
“King” Jacob was actually born in a German kingdom, Wurtemberg, in 1819, in the town of Kircheim unter Teck. His father Gottlieb Schoellkopf, a wealthy tanner, and mother Christina Maier had 15 children, four of whom died as infants. Jacob Friedrich attended school until age 14, at which time he entered his father’s leather tanning business for a five-year apprenticeship. At 19, he travelled to Strasbourg, France, where for two years he was employed at a leather trading firm. Twenty-two-year-old Jacob left for America in 1841, pulled by the land of opportunity and pushed by the fact that his oldest brother, Karl, had taken over the family’s tanning business.
Jacob spent two years in New York City working at a tannery and learning the English language. Seeking a better opportunity for advancement, the highly motivated young Schoellkopf moved to Buffalo, which boasted a population of 26,500 in 1844. His American odyssey, however, was not a typical rags-to-riches emigrant’s story in that he had arrived in the U.S. already well-trained in the established trades of tanning and leather goods marketing. In addition, throughout his early years here he could depend upon his father for timely loans, which facilitated his entrepreneurial drive. It was that personal drive, however, and certainly a modicum of luck, a great ability to correctly judge the positive potentials of varied enterprises, and a rock-ribbed persistence that would propel Mr. Schoellkopf from success to success.
Throughout the 1800s, leather was much in demand. Besides the demand for shoe and belt leather, the age of the horse required almost unlimited supplies of leather for harnesses and saddlery, and machine tools were interconnected to water wheels and steam engines by massive leather belts. Sheepskin leather retained its wool overcoat and fleece-lined garments were highly valued during Buffalo’s winter months.
Upon his arrival in Buffalo in 1844, then, Jacob opened a retail leather goods shop on Mohawk Street near the waterfront. Over the next two years, through the judicious use of profits from his retail store, paternal loans and local credit, he acquired ownership of a tannery located in White’s Corner (now Hamburg), a Buffalo sheepskin tannery, and an additional tannery in North Evans. The Buffalo sheepskin tannery, located on Perry and Mississippi Streets, would become the largest tannery in the nation.
By 1847, Jacob had become financially stable enough that he could entice his sweetheart back in Kircheim, Christine Sophie Durr, to join him in Buffalo. They wed on March 12, 1848. Over the next 13 years, the couple had 11 children, seven of whom (Heinrich, Louis, Arthur, Jacob Jr., Alfred, C.P. Hugo and Helen) survived to adulthood.
Three of Jacob’s sons, Heinrich, Louis, and Alfred would eventually form the J.F. Schoellkopf’s Sons Tannery enterprise with Jacob’s encouragement. Also, in 1848, Jacob convinced his cousin Friedrich Vogel to leave Wurtemberg and join him in further tanning ventures by bankrolling Vogel tanneries in Milwaukee, Chicago, and Fort Wayne. He maintained a financial stake in those tanneries until 1856, when he sold his shares to concentrate his capital in Western New York. Additionally, Schoellkopf’s tanneries had paid great dividends over the course of the Civil War (1861-1865), during which he marketed harnesses and saddles to the Union Army and accrued more disposable wealth.
Flour Milling and Hydro Power
Looking for another profitable arena other than tanning, Schoellkopf next turned his gaze upon the flour milling trade. Until the mid-1800s, this was typically a small-mill, localized concern. By then, however, industrialized mills catering to large markets had emerged. Although he lacked experience in milling, Jacob intuitively understood its mass market potential and he plunged in, funding the construction of the North Buffalo Flouring Mill in Black Rock in 1857. Schoellkopf’s mill was successful and, by 1863, he was the third largest producer of flour in Buffalo. Two years later, however, he had fallen to sixth place. Undaunted, Jacob marched on and by 1878, having partnered with a knowledgeable young miller named George B. Mathews and forming the Schoellkopf & Mathews firm, he had added two other mills, including the Frontier mill. That year profits were $91,000 ($671,000 today) and the three mills’ combined output made Schoellkopf the largest flour producer in Western New York.
The flour from these mills was sold locally, and to the New York City market via boatloads of barreled flour shipped on the Erie Canal. (There was an entrance to the Erie Canal on the Black Rock Channel. In fact, the water in the Canal from Buffalo to Rochester was supplied by the Black Rock Channel). All three mills owned by Jacob Schoellkopf were sited on the Black Rock Channel, whose abundant flowing water supply constituted what was essentially an extended millrace. The Frontier mill, for example, was located on Squaw Island opposite today’s Rich Products site. Because of his experience with the Black Rock Channel, Jacob gained an appreciation for the merits of flowing water as a source of power. And because of this, when another potential source of water power came on the market, Schoellkopf spent capital to obtain it.
On May 1, 1877, Jacob announced to his beloved Christine, “Mama, I bought me a ditch.” That day he had purchased at auction a 4,500-foot-long hydraulic canal in Niagara Falls, NY. It diverted water from the upper Niagara River to the “High Banks” precipice that loomed 210 feet above the lower Niagara, half a mile north of the American Falls. This was a bold move, as the attempt to build and utilize that man-made stream had bankrupted a series of prior owners. In typical Schoellkopf fashion, Jacob disdained the bidding process which opened at $5,000 and proffered $67,000 as his opener. Two bids later he closed the deal at $71,000, (equivalent to $1.6 million today), which he paid in cash.
Over the course of the next several years, Schoellkopf worked hard to silence the naysayers who argued that he had saddled himself with a white elephant. At the time of his purchase, the canal was being used by only one paying company, the Gaskill Flouring Mill. Jacob and his Buffalo milling partner George Mathews constructed two other flour mills on the site, which proved the mill district’s capabilities. He also brought his son Arthur into the newly formed Niagara Falls Hydraulic Power and Manufacturing Company. Arthur Schoellkopf, in his early twenties, had been educated at Bryant and Stratton Business College and had obtained managerial experience working for the Schoellkopf & Mathews milling concern in Buffalo. Arthur was appointed treasurer, secretary and general manager, and he and his father mounted a successful marketing campaign which resulted in four other companies leasing land and water power rights. These included two pulp and paper mills, the Oneida Community silverplating plant and the Pittsburgh Reduction Company of America plant. These last two operations exemplified the early nurturing of a nascent electrochemical sector of American industry that would explode into billion-dollar enterprises. We now know, for example, Pittsburgh Reduction as the Aluminum Company of America, Alcoa.
In 1881, Charles Brush of Euclid, OH, arrived in Niagara Falls with 16 of his electric carbon arc lights and a 2,500-pound dynamo (generator) which he proposed using to light up the Falls. Jacob offered to convert one of his flour mills, “Quigly’s Mill,” into an electric generating plant. Brush’s dynamo was installed and the Quigly water turbine used to activate it. The Quigly Mill, then, was “one of the first hydroelectric stations in the world,” and its output was used to illuminate the Falls for one season. Eventually three generators were installed in this “Schoellkopf Station No. 1,” and their output was used to energize the City of Niagara Falls’ street railway and streetlights, several factories and stores, and the offices of the Niagara Falls Gazette newspaper.
Jacob was now fully bitten by the hydroelectric bug and, realizing that centrally located hydroelectric plants and their attendant wire-based distribution systems would soon free mills and factories from their bondage to locally flowing streams, he constructed the Schoellkopf Power Station No. 2 in 1898. It was an amazing technological leap forward. Plant 1, Quigly’s Mill, was located atop the High Banks precipice and utilized only an 86-foot water drop into its wheel pit to impel its water turbine, which drove three dynamos. Plant 2 was placed at the foot of the cliff and took advantage of the full 210-foot water drop to rotate 15 turbines which in turn spun 31 electric generators, producing electricity that was used by several electrochemical process companies which moved into Niagara Falls to take advantage of that power.
Prior to his death in 1899, Jacob Friedrich had envisioned yet a third hydro plant. His two sons, Arthur and Jacob Friedrich Jr., who had retained ownership and management of the Hydraulic Power Company, saw to the completion of what became Schoellkopf Power Plants Nos. 3A, 3B and 3C at the base of the High Banks by the late 1920s. These plants, with their multiple water turbine/electric generator combines, would generate enough electric energy to meet much of Western New York’s and New York State’s electric demands. Station 3A continued to run until 1961. Stations 3B and 3C, however, were obliterated in a massive rockslide in 1956, an event which, in turn, initiated the construction of the present-day hydroelectric plant by the Power Authority of the State of New York and the demolition of Schoellkopf plant 3A in 1961. In 1920, the Schoellkopf Hydraulic Power Company merged with several other New York State-based electric providers (including the Niagara Falls Power Company, whose Edward Dean Adams power plant beat the Schoellkopf concern in electrifying the City of Buffalo) to create Niagara Mohawk, which, in turn, was absorbed into National Grid in 2000.
Chemistry and Dye Making
By the late 1800s, Germany, whose chemists pioneered in the effort, had attained a near monopoly in the manufacturing and marketing of the coal tar dyes used to color the wool, cotton and silk textiles, as well as the leather accoutrements of the era. Once again, Jacob Friedrich Schoellkopf’s intuition led him down an unexplored path when he realized that breaking this monopoly over the American dye market could be financially rewarding. Indeed, he was so sure of this that he was willing to invest not only capital, but two of his sons’ futures in that enterprise.
In 1873, 15-year-old Jacob Friedrich Schoellkopf Jr. travelled to Germany. For the next seven years, he studied the intricacies of dye chemistry at the technical universities at Munich and Stuttgart. Graduating from Stuttgart, Jacob Jr. returned to Buffalo in 1880, where his father, in 1879, had already incorporated the Schoellkopf Aniline and Chemical Company. Aniline, extracted from coal tar, is a “mother molecule” which, when combined with different “intermediate” chemical molecules, produces various coal tar dyes. Perhaps the most famous Aniline dye is the deep blue colorant known as synthetic indigo. Jacob Jr. shared his father’s earnest goal of placing the American dye industry on an independent footing and threw himself into the technical side of the business, while his father managed the business side. In 1885, Jacob Jr’s. younger brother, Charles P. Hugo Schoellkopf (known as C.P. Hugo), who at age 16 had also gone to Germany and had attained university degrees in business management and chemistry during a five-year stay, returned to Buffalo and became the general manager of Schoellkopf Aniline.
Over the following decades, under the leadership of this Schoellkopf family trio, The Schoellkopf Aniline works on the Buffalo River along Elk and Lee Streets grew to a 36-acre site, hosting 30 brick buildings. By the outbreak of World War I, the company had become the largest producer of dyes in the U.S., employing 350 men and producing 100 dyes. In 1915, the Analine works employed 600 people working around-the-clock. Prior to the war, Schoellkopf Aniline had used hundreds of chemical intermediates purchased from Germany. When that source dried up with American entry into the war, Schoellkopf chemists labored mightily and successfully to synthesize those molecules on site. The products of their labor included Niagara Blue, Buffalo Black, Erie Brown, Khaki Brown, Erie Green, Brilliant Scarlet, Wool Yellow, Direct Orange, Methyl Violet and Indigo. The indigo dye manufactured in Buffalo was used extensively in the denim clothing market for decades. The Schoellkopf works would similarly throw itself into the nation’s World War II effort.
From 1900 to 1920, Schoellkopf Aniline and Chemical Company expanded its operational presence to several other cities, including New York City, Brooklyn and Philadelphia, while over the same period serially merging with other dye manufacturers and changing its corporate name to Schoellkopf, Hartford & Hanna (1900), National Aniline and Chemical (1917) and Allied Chemical and Dye (1920). With that final step, all dye manufacturing operations were consolidated at the Schoellkopf works in Buffalo. Throughout the Schoellkopf, Hartford & Hanna and National Aniline era, both Jacob Frederick, Jr. and C.P. Hugo Schoellkopf retained officer or board of director positions in those companies. In 1976, the Schoellkopf Allied works were sold to Buffalo Color Corporation, which specialized in the production of indigo for the blue jeans market. Buffalo Color was bankrupted in 2003, under pressure from increasingly stringent environmental regulation costs and the importation of cheap dye from China, and the Schoellkopf works were shut down.
Community Involvement
Jacob Friedrich Schoellkopf was highly respected in the Western New York business community for his integrity and business acumen, and he was eagerly sought after to lend his talents to other enterprises. For example, he was on the board of directors of the Buffalo German Insurance Company, the Merchant Bank of Buffalo, the German Bank of Buffalo and the Farmer and Merchant’s National Bank. He served as a trustee for the Bank of Niagara, the Power City Bank and Buffalo General Hospital. Jacob also was president and director of the Citizens’ Gas Company of Buffalo and vice president of the Buffalo, New York & Philadelphia Railroad.
Not content to spend time in all of the above, Jacob also assumed ownership of the Niagara Falls Brewing Company. (Being German, how could he not? His son Alfred was the treasurer.) For a time, he owned and ran, with help from Louis, Alfred, and Jacob, the famous International Hotel in Niagara Falls. This amazing man, Jacob Friedrich Schoellkopf, passed away in 1899, aged 79. His dear Christine followed him four years later. The name Schoellkopf, however, is still widely known and admired in Western New York today.
