Andrew H. Denker

Andrew Henry Denker (October 17, 1840 – November 13, 1892) was a German-born American businessman and politician was a business partner of Henry Hammel. He and Hammel, his brother-in-law, ran hotels and owned an extensive spread of agricultural property that eventually became the city of Beverly Hills, California.

Personal life

Denker was born in Brunswick, near Bremen, Germany, on October 17, 1840, a farmer's son. He began working in a shop in Brunswick, but in 1857 he sailed for New York City, where he again found employment in a store, then beginning a small business of his own. In 1863 he voyaged to San Francisco via the Panama Isthmus, soon prospecting for minerals in Arizona and New Mexico. He entered Los Angeles afterward, penniless, but found employment as a clerk in a hotel first named the Lafayette, then the Cosmopolitan and finally the St. Elmo Hotel. At that time it was owned by Kohl, Dockwiler and Fluhe, but later it became the property of Hammel and Denker.

His will provided for legacies to his family, identified in the Herald at the time as wife Louise A. and children Mary M. Lichtenberger, Antoinette Lichtenberger, Leontine V. Denker, Isabella C. Mayer and Louis A. Denker, and two brothers and a sister. and despite the fact that he favored retaining Havilah as the county seat, a popular election decided 354 to 332 to move the seat of government to Bakersfield.

He was also one of the charter members of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce in 1888. One of his preoccupations one the construction of "the largest hotel in Southern California" on Tenth Street in Los Angeles,

The two men had the same attorney, J. D. Bicknell, "and upon him devolved the burden of reducing order out of chaos." The appraised value of the Hammel estate was $534,428.04, and that of the Denker estate was $338,053.

According to most sources, the partners then leased the United States Hotel at the corner of Requena and Main streets in Los Angeles, in 1869. ) They kept the hotel until "the opening of the great real-estate boom of 1886." Only nine years later it would make way for the Douglas Building (1899) which still stands in the location now.

Ranching

Edward Preuss purchased the Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas in 1868 from landowners Benjamin D. Wilson and Henry Hancock "with the intention of establishing a colony for German immigrants"; these plans, though, were ruined by a drought and Hammel and Denker bought the land in the 1880s. It was noted as "a fertile stretch of over thirty-five hundred acres of valley and frostless foothill land lying between Los Angeles and Santa Monica."

The extensive rancho was managed as a "grain and stock business" by Henry H. Denker, Andrew's brother, for more than thirty years.

Legacy

The city of Beverly Hills, California, is the principal legacy of the two brothers-in-law. Their 3,055-acre swath of land "lying between Hollywood and Sherman and extending from the hills to the lowest portion of the plane ," had "oil, plenty of water and fine high soil as well as low land, where the soil is of heavy body," as one account put it in 1905 when the rancho was about to be put on the market.

Earlier, though, shortly after Denker's death, there was an auction at the ranch of "Horses, cows, heifers, milk wagons, farmer wagons, carriages, four-seated tourists' wagon and buggies, two headers, mowers, barrows . . . All the farming implements and tools; also one team of imported Shetland ponies (black). The celebrated trotting stallion Prince Edward. . . . Lunch will be served."