The Fascinating Life of James Lick - A Self-Made Millionaire Who Revolutionized California!

An old man is laying in a bed, he's not really all that old in his late seventies. He would like nothing more than to not be stuck in his bed, weak and slowly dying. trapped in his thoughts knowing his time is near and drawing closer every minute. This man is extremely wealthy, has very few real friends, and many posers. His whole life has been that of being the weird outcast. From the beginning until now he has lived his life to prove himself worthy. To silence the naysayers and to gloat about his superiority when others scoffed at his insignificance. Thinking to himself on what to do with his riches this old man immediately thinks to create a giant statue of himself. But then he is reminded of a man whose ideas have shaped his beliefs. Thomas Paine. You could say this old man had a bracelet on his wrist that had the letters W W P D ? What Would Paine Do?

Well? What would the Great Thomas Paine do with all this wealth if he knows that the grim reaper has his name on a list?

With that, this old man began to think...

In this episode of Ricky's Historical Tidbits. I will tell you the story of James Lick.

So let’s go back in time to lay the groundwork, shall we?

Way back in the day, there was a man named William Luk who came to America and Fought in the Revolution under George Washington. He had a son John who then had a son James. This was in the Pennsylvania area by the way.

John was a carpenter who raised his son James to follow in his footsteps. After he was sufficiently educated at 13 years old he was put into an apprenticeship where he learned carpentry and cabinetry. His father was a strict and harsh teacher but James became extremely skilled at his work. Soon when he was 21 he caught the eye of a young lady named Barbara. He loved her and As things go she got knocked up. James went to her dad who owned a big fancy Mill and asked for her hand in marriage. Maybe he didn't mention she was pregnant or Her dad didn't care because her dad replied by putting him down. Asking if he had any money or had a business. Then he told James that he could marry her when he has a big fancy mill like his.

James yelled back at him,

"Some day I will own a mill that will make yours look like a pigsty!"

James left town for Baltimore where for a little while to learn how to make pianos. Soon he moved to New York where he opened up his own shop. He noticed after a couple of years that the majority of his pianos were being shipped down to Argentina. So at 25 years old in 1821 he moved to Argentina.

But Argentina was not all that grand. The country at the time was full of violence and all kinds of death. He felt like death most of the time from all the different diseases and viruses that he hadn't been exposed to before. After a few years there he just couldn't take it anymore. He even wrote home this...

"One minute in the clouds of heaven and the next, in the depths of the sea. And death always before my eyes in ten thousand forms. This is far from peaceful living. I would not wish it on my worst enemy."

Eventually, he got sick and tired of it and left Argentina. Selling his company and taking a year's vacation to tour Europe.

On his way back the ship he was on was taken by some Portuguese Pirates where he was taken as a prisoner to Montevideo, Uruguay. Somehow he was able to escape and made it to Buenos Aires on foot. that’s about 150 miles. From there he needed to find a job to get back to the United States, soHe started working in the fur trade. he did pretty darn well saving up forty thousand dollars which got him back home to Pennsylvania. He planned to meet up with his long-lost baby mama but when she heard he was coming to town she took their son and left town.  She was married to some other guy by then anyways.

Hurt by this he went back to Buenos Aires for a little then, to Chile, and then to Peru. Where he went back to making pianos. He had quite a bit of employees working for him as well which made him pretty well of man.

Pictured is Domingo Ghirardelli - He and James Lick were business neighbors in Peru.

Eventually, in the early 1840s, he saw an opportunity coming around the bend. The United States was pushing west and tensions were brewing between the Mexicans and the Americans, Lick predicted that there would be a war and California would be annexed into the union. So he planned on going to this new land called California. It took him a couple of years though because all his workers quit and went to Mexico to fight so Lick had a bunch of piano orders he had to fill first. but then...

He finished, sold all his stock, and got himself a big ol' iron safe that held his thirty thousand dollars worth of gold in it (which today would be about a million) and set sail for San Francisco which was a little ol' town back then.

Oh, and he brought with him six hundred pounds of his friend Ghirrardelli's Chocholate. He sold the chocolate super fast, everyone loved it. He sent a letter back to Ghirardelli telling him to come to California and you can learn about that in my episode about Ghirardelli.

Back to Lick.

People thought he was a crazy man. He was buying up all kinds of land in town and especially the cheap and so-called worthless agricultural land. But his intuition worked because 17 days after he arrived in California some guy named James Marshall working out in the Coloma area at a mill for a guy named John Sutter and happened upon some shiny stuff...

within 2 years that little old town of San Francisco grew twenty times its size and much of the new houses were on Lick’s land.

Lick like most people tried mining but gave up fairly quickly. He put his land in control of an agent and he set his sights on a nearby city called San Jose.

San Jose is where he focused on agriculture and farming operations. building great wineries and this gave him the perfect opportunity to finally make true his words way back when to his baby mama’s daddy. The fanciest and biggest mill in the state with brand new east state machinery and all the fancy stuff you could want in a mill, he had, he spent around two hundred thousand dollars which would be seven and a half million today. Once it was finished, he hired a photographer to take a bunch of pictures and send them on over to the mean old man who wouldn't let James marry his daughter. 

Around the same time he wrote to his son who he never met, by this point was 37 years old to come and be the manager of this new mill. His son accepted the offer and came to California to work for his dad. They didn't like each other much. for 8 years John worked for his dad at the mill and they shared a tiny cabin. James thought john was kinda lazy and had no ambition in life like he did. Eventually, James decided to build a fancy schmancy mansion with 24 rooms with a marble fireplace in each.

But his son didn't care for it. James decided about halfway through building the mansion to just stop and cancel the project. He started sleeping on a door on the floor and used the 24 rooms for drying fruit from his orchards. 

He soon moved on to another project called the Lick House which was a big ol' hotel with a huge dining room, it was actually considered the nicest hotel this side of the Mississippi but the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco brought it down. 

Finally, probably to the joy of James, his son quit the mill and moved back East to Pennsylvania. After he left, James cut his son out of the will and wrote that he did that because his son was a bad caretaker of his pet parrot. From there he was able to just live life without trying to impress anyone. he just did what he wanted to do for himself and nobody else. This is why this multi-millionaire continued to live in a little cabin and wore a Charlie Chaplin-like tramp suit around town. 

He decided to add a big flower garden by the mill and it was fairly well known. For some rich man fun and to see if his workers would simply do what they were told he had a bunch of trees planted upside down so the roots were up and the leaves were buried. Once he saw they actually did it he smiled and said now flip ‘em back the way they're supposed to be. 

James wouldn't allow anyone to criticize him. he worked hard to get to where he was and he wasn’t going to let anyone bad mouth him, he had some ladies visiting his mill and the flower garden. They kept telling him how great and beautiful everything was. Eventually, one lady leaned over and told another that she'd seen better gardens over in San Francisco. James overheard that and took them out to a so-called secret garden which was just a big ol mustard field and then dumped them off to find their way back. 

Also, one time he ordered a replica greenhouse of some fancy one over in London, he was going to gift it to the city of San Jose but some newspaper editor published an article that was unflattering. So James decided to not give it to San Jose and not even open the crates that the greenhouse came in. It wasn’t until after he died that they got opened and became the Conservatory of Flowers at golden gate park in San Francisco. 

He continued to buy up lots of land, and by the time he died, he owned all of Santa Catalina Island down there by LA. 

Now this brings us back to where we started, James Lick ended up having a stroke and was left pretty bad. So he started planning his exit. He was the richest man in California at the time having a bunch of land in San Francisco, San Jose, Lake Bigler,  Catalina Island, and a big ranch in LA. 

His first thought was to build a ginormous statue of him and his parents but was convinced that it would be a target in the case of an invasion by enemies of the U.S. Then he planned to clear out all his land in San Fransisco and build a pyramid larger than Giza. But eventually, he was convinced to build the biggest and best telescope and observatory. So that's what he did, He had the Lick Observatory just outside of San Jose on Mount Hamilton. 

Then he gave money to build the Lick Baths in San Francisco.

Then founded The California School of Mechanic Arts.

Built Golden Gate Park and the Statue of Francis Scott Key.  

He had the Lick old Ladies’ Home built.

The pioneer monument in San Francisco.

Today there are still a bunch of places named after Lick. My grandma went to James Lick High School, But there’s also The James Lick Middle School, The Lick-Wilmerding High School,   The James Lick Highway, Southern Pacific named one of their control points after him, There used to be a lick train station, Lick line, there was an asteroid back in 1951 named lick, a town nearby his hometown over in Pennsylvania was named Lickdale, Theres a Lick monument in Pennsylvania.

There’s even a lizard named after him the scelepoous licki 

Remember in the beginning when I said he was a huge fan of Thomas Paine? Well, He left the mill to the Thomas Paine Memorial Association, that was a huge deal. but apparently not to them, they came and sold it the next day for a measly eighteen grand.