Imagine life in the Kingdom of Hannover two hundred years ago. Because this is where my ancestor Claus Mangels was born.
Agnes Lilly Tillmann’s maternal grandfather Claus Mangels was an 1850s arrival in San Francisco. In later years Claus Mangels lived in the Mission District, following a career as brewery owner and real estate developer. However, Claus is likely best known by association with Claus Spreckels, a German-American mechanical genius and coincidentally his brother-in-law.
Agnes Lilly was not quite two years old when grandfather Mangels died, but she remembered stroking his beard. Claus Spreckels outlived his brother-in-law and my grandmother knew “The Sugar King” well.
Agnes Lilly’s maternal grandmother was Agnes Grosse — and the name “Agnes” has christened at least five generations of family women-folk. Agnes Grosse died at age 31 in 1875, fourteen years before her namesake granddaughter was born in 1889. However, my grandmother Agnes Lilly knew the second wife of Claus Mangels quite well. Her name was Emma Zwieg.
There are no family stories about the “romance” between Claus Mangels and his first wife Agnes Grosse. However, facts reveal something about how they met.
In 1859 twenty-something Claus Mangels shows up in the Sierras foothill town of Marysville (California), listed by newspapers as a volunteer fireman, Americanizing his name as “Charles” Mangels. Mangels likely followed the Spreckels brothers from New York to San Francisco via the Isthmus, arriving in 1856 or shortly thereafter either with Claus Spreckels or Peter, another Spreckels brother.
In Marysville, Claus Mangels was associated with Peter Spreckels and they operated a business as liquor wholesalers. Heck, the guys bunked together too — according to the 1860 census, Peter Spreckels & “Charles” Mangels boarded with Henry Spreckels (another brother) and John Ringen, a name to remember.
Agnes Grosse, the future wife of Claus Mangels, arrived in California much earlier. Parents Philip and Agnes Grosse brought their kids overland from New Orleans in the very early 1850s.
My late cousin Karl Mertz, also a Mangels descendant, shared a story about the Grosse family that he heard from the daughter of Claus Mangels:
“I remember Tanti [Agnes Mangels] saying they [the Grosse family] all came together [from Westphalia] on a ship which landed in New Orleans [1846], then came overland, spending some time in Hangtown (Placerville) where the women made sandwiches and ran a small eatery and a store. Tanti said, as there was no refrigeration, the ladies scrubbed the meat in the creek to get the mold, etc., off and make it nice and pink. It was ‘well hung’ and aged.”
Karl Mertz, Oral History
This story is supported factually by ship manifests and mid-1850 newspaper references to Philip Grosse in Amador county. The ham story makes sense if the timeframe is early 1850s.
By 1860 Philip Grosse and family show up in Marysville where Philip opened the “Bank Exchange”, a “First Class Saloon” on High Street. As the advertisement reads:
“As he [Philip] resides, with his family, in the upper portion of the building it will be his aim to keep a quiet, orderly, and respectable place, such a one as he trusts will prove a pleasant place of resort for his friends.”
“Quiet, orderly, and respectable.” Did I mention that Philip had FIVE daughters? In other words, my great grandmother had four sisters. In 1860 there were twin 14-year olds (Lisette, Agnes) and three younger daughters Another reason for orderliness and respectability.
Philip’s “friends” must have included liquor wholesalers Peter Spreckels and Claus Mangels — Marysville resident and members of the Spreckels clan although in 1860 Claus Spreckels — the future “Sugar King” — was then only the proprietor of San Francisco’s Albany Brewery.
Marysville was the launching point for the northern mines, and in the 1850s the city boasted a large population of emigrant Germans. As such, Marysville was a logical distribution point for lager beer manufactured by Albany Brewery, taken over by the Spreckels brothers (and their Mangels brother-in-law!) in 1858.
While calling on the proprietor of the Bank Exchange on High Street, Peter Spreckels and Claus Mangels likely took a fancy to Lisette and Agnes Grosse — the “Heavenly Twins”, so referred to in a family document. In 1860 Peter Spreckels married Elizabeth Grosse, one of the Heavenly Twins. (By way of comparison of wealth, census records show Philip Grosse, $200; Peter Spreckels & Claus Mangels, $1000 each.)
And in San Francisco in 1862, two years later, 30-year old Claus Mangels married 18-year old Agnes Grosse, the other Heavenly Twin. The newlyweds soon took up residence in the bustling city of San Francisco near today’s Moscone Center, the location of the Albany Brewery.
As an aside, the year 1862 witnessed a devastating flood in Sacramento and Marysville. Agnes — wife of Phil Grosse and the newlywed’s mother — died later in 1862 in Marysville, perhaps flood related.
Following are the five daughters of the Philip Grosse family. In the 19th century both Peter Spreckels and the Mangels families kept in contact with the Grosse family.
After marriage, Agnes Grosse moved with her husband permanently to San Francisco where they had five children, four surviving. The only son Henry died in his 30s in the 1890s, leaving no heirs. Sisters Anna Lisette and Emma married Ernest Hueter and Frederick Tillmann Jr., respectively, and had families. Sister Agnes celebrated a long life of spinsterhood, coddling her nieces and nephews.
The last of the Mangels men died in the 1890s before my grandmother even turned ten. And the only living Mangels children were daughters — Agnes Lilly’s mother Emma Mangels Tillmann and Emma’s maiden sister Agnes Mangels, who lived in the Tillmann household with her sister.
Surprising to me, Claus Mangels himself came from a large family. In the 1850s and 1860s Claus Mangels was one of five Mangels siblings to settle in California, joined also by parents. Back in Germany the Mangels family must have been farmers because all the Mangels men acquired crop, orchard, or ranch lands in California.
Upon arrival all the Mangels siblings lived in San Francisco at one time or another, but over time they dispersed into surrounding counties.
- Claus Mangels was a permanent City resident; he also acquired 550 acres of timber and dairy lands in Aptos, Santa Cruz county.
- Also in Aptos was sister Anna Christina Mangels (via husband Claus Spreckels), who owned the Aptos Rancho and its thousands of acres of meadows, creeks, and redwood groves, acquired from the original grantee (Raphael Castro).
- Brother John Mangels married Emmeline Corcoran, member of an early Santa Cruz pioneer family; John served as ranch foreman for the Santa Cruz properties of his brother-in-law Claus Spreckels.
- Brother Louis Mangels married early pioneer Minna Shrader and they acquired viticulture lands near Fairfield, Solano county.
- Sister Catherine Mangels married Henry Buhrmeister, an orchard farmer near Cordelia, Solano county.
- Sister Marie Mangels married Henry Grotheer, a farmer near Half Moon Bay.
- Sophie Mangels married Claus Brommer, a horse breeder near Santa Cruz.
Mangels & Spreckels
Of the Mangels siblings, elder sister Anna Christina stands out because (as mentioned frequently) she married Claus Spreckels, a mechanical genius who applied a brewer’s expertise to sugar refining, in my mind best compared to inventors like Thomas Alva Edison.
Anna Christina Mangels and Claus Spreckels married back in New York in the early 1850s, and after a short stay in Charleston, South Carolina, arrived in California with husband and children. According to family legend young Claus Spreckels and Anna Christina were childhood sweethearts back in Germany, and the close relationship between Mangels and Spreckels families in California can be traced back to the Kingdom of Hanover, their original homeland.
The Spreckels bond with Mangels was twofold. In other words, Claus Mangels was a double brother-in-law to the Spreckels family. First, a Mangels sister (Anna Christina) married Claus SPRECKELS.
Second, as mentioned earlier, Claus Mangels and childhood friend Peter Spreckels married a pair of saloon keeper’s daughters from Marysville. Although Peter Spreckels retired to Germany, he kept up close ties with the Mangels family until the end, entertaining family traveling abroad.
The double relationship that connected Claus Mangels to the Spreckels family explains the very close ties between family members that existed in the earliest generations.