First, thank you to everyone who shared last week's post about the Marshalls Creek explosion and the search for surviving relatives and friends of the victims. If you haven't seen it, please do check it out and pass it on to anyone you think might be able to help with that.
For this week's quest, we're heading out to Lancaster County thanks to some help from my pal Jon, the Hometown Historian. We both were researching this gentleman last year, and we had amusingly opposite experiences. I was in Lititz on a bitterly windy day in February and was able to get photos of the marker, while he was there later in the year and was able to get photos of the gravesite. But I hadn't found the grave, and he hadn't found the marker, so naturally we teamed up and traded pictures. You can find the video he made in my sources section at the bottom of the post. Thanks, Jon!
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The marker stands at the intersection of South Broad
and West Lemon Streets in Lititz |
I first learned the name Sutter while reading a children's book called Mitch and Amy. This book was authored by the beloved Beverly Cleary, who is probably best remembered for the Ramona books that were still being written when I was a child. One thing I remember clearly about the book was that Mitch's class was studying the California Gold Rush, and Mitch created a replica of something called "Sutter's mill" out of toothpicks. But I don't remember the book actually explaining who Sutter was or why he had a mill.
I can't say I remember learning about him in school, either, just that there were scores of people hurrying out to California, and later Alaska, in hopes of finding gold. To this young Pennsylvanian, doing that sounded about as logical as selling your house for money to buy lottery tickets. But I remembered the name Sutter from that book, and it came as quite a surprise when, as an adult, I discovered that he's buried right here in the commonwealth.
Johann Agust Sutter was born on February 23, 1803 in what today is Kandern, Baden, Germany, where the house in which he was born still stands. His parents were Johann Jakob and Christina (Stober) Sutter. In his early twenties he married a woman named Anna Dubeld, although I couldn't find anything else about her. John was a spendthrift whose debts were mounting, and as he entered his thirties those debts saw him facing potential jail time. Rather than sit through a trial, he decided to rename himself Captain John Augustus Sutter and head for the United States. In 1834 he took Anna and their five children to Switzerland and left them there, then went to Le Havre, France to get a French passport and board a ship to New York City. He landed there on July 14th of that year.
If the fact that he left his family behind and fled the problems of his own making are giving you the idea that John Sutter wasn't the nicest person on the planet, you're not wrong. I won't get into a full accounting of everything he did wrong, because my blog posts are meant to be overviews to whet the appetite for history, but I'll try not to soften it too much either. The picture of him seen at left is undated, and comes from the Museum of the City of San Francisco.
From New York, John did a lot of traveling. He spoke Swiss French, English, and Spanish, which helped him in his explorations throughout the then-very-small United States, part of Canada, and the western wilderness. After five years of this, he made his way to Alta California, which was then part of Mexico, and arrived in a small bay town called Yerba Buena; you know it better by its modern name, San Francisco.
In order to purchase land, John had to live in the area for a year and become a citizen of Mexico, which he did. Once he had his land, he built Sutter's Fort, a central walled building, and by 1841 he had completed a settlement he called New Helvetia ("New Switzerland"). He was then the owner of nearly fifty thousand acres of land along the Sacramento River, and today what was once New Helvetia is part of Sacramento, the capital city of the state of California. This is why he's remembered as the founder of Sacramento, even though that honor should really go to his son.
I'd be remiss if I didn't admit to how John accomplished the establishment of New Helvetia. He relied on the Native Americans for labor, and while some did work for him voluntarily, most of them were, to put it bluntly, forced into it. Eyewitness accounts from some of his fellow Europeans describe some pretty horrific conditions under which these workers were kept, very similar to those used on slaves in the southern United States. John and his fellow European settlers forced the Natives to sleep on bare floors, eat gruel out of troughs, and be locked up at night. Some were sold or given as gifts to help pay off debts, and rumors circulated that women and young girls were routinely violated. These things were all forbidden under Mexican law; but in 1850, California was annexed by the United States and new laws were devised to make it perfectly legal to kidnap and enslave Natives.
But two years before that change of law, something happened which cemented John's place in history - and his ruin. He hired James Marshall to build a sawmill along the American River, in order to provide lumber for the construction of New Helvetia. The picture at right, courtesy of WikiCommons, shows the mill as it appeared in 1850. One morning, while inspecting the mill, James Marshall found some gold nuggets in the silt around the millwheel and brought them to John. Having concluded that they were real gold, John began trying to gain as much land around the discovery as possible, and meanwhile the two men tried to keep the gold a secret.
Three guesses how well that worked out. Unfortunately for John and James, a San Francisco newspaper publisher visited the mill region and acquired some gold himself. He immediately went home and started raving about it in the media. The California Gold Rush began, and swarms of people were soon flooding into John's territory. His land was overrun, his crops spoiled, his livestock stolen or slaughtered, his buildings inhabited by squatters. He transferred ownership of what he hadn't lost to his son, John Junior, who came over from Switzerland to join him later that same year. John Junior found his father in deep debt and took over the business, and began laying out the plans for Sacramento, which he named after the river. Dad didn't like that - he wanted the town to be called Sutterville. But he gave up, let John Junior do as he wished, and finally reunited with his wife and younger children in another part of California. They lived on a settlement called Hock Farm until 1865, when it was destroyed by fire, after which John and Anna moved to Washington D.C.
By this sudden discovery of the gold, all my great plans were destroyed. Had I succeeded for a few years before the gold was discovered, I would have been the richest citizen on the Pacific shore; but it had to be different.
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Grave of John and Anna Sutter.
Image courtesy of Jonathan Miller. |
In Washington, he applied to be reimbursed for what he had lost during the Gold Rush, when the prospectors had destroyed, stolen, and otherwise ruined most of what he had owned in New Helvetia. The government granted him a pension of $250 a month to reimburse him for the taxes he paid on the land while it had been his. In 1871, he and Anna relocated to Lititz, attracted by rumors of the healing properties of Lititz Spring waters and also by the quality of the
Moravian schools there, which he wanted his grandchildren to attend. They built a home opposite what today is the
Lititz Springs Inn. John spent the rest of his life trying to get Congress to repay him for his losses. A bill was finally proposed in June of 1880, which would have given him $50,000 in restitution, but Congress adjourned before a vote was taken.
John died in Washington, in his hotel room, on June 16, 1880. His body was returned to Lititz and given a resting place in the Moravian Cemetery. Anna died just months later, in January 1881, and is buried with him - an unusual case, as couples are not often buried together in Moravian cemeteries. The house in which they had lived still stands in Lititz and is on the National Register of Historic Places. Several locations in California still bear the Sutter name, including streets, a mountain range, and a county. But the Sutter Medical Center in Sacramento, though it still has his name, no longer has a statue of John Sutter; it was removed in 2020 out of respect for the memory of those whose lives were upended by his pursuit of wealth.
Sources and Further Reading:
Dillion, Richard. Fool's Gold: The Decline and Fall of Captain John Sutter of California. Coward-McCann, New York, 1967.
Except where indicated, all writing and photography on this blog is the intellectual property of Laura Klotz. This blog is written with permission of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. I am not employed by the PHMC. All rights reserved.
Very interesting!
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