Henry Hammel

Henry Hammel ( – September 3, 1890) was a German-born American businessman and politician was a business partner of Andrew H. Denker. He served on the Los Angeles Common Council from December 9, 1882, to December 9, 1884, and, with the help of his brother-in-law Denker, ran hotels and owned an extensive spread of agricultural property that eventually became the city of Beverly Hills, California.

Personal life

Hammel was born in Germany and came to the United States in 1833 or 1834 and engaged in hotel-keeping. He was also interested in grape-growing and owned a large vineyard in Los Angeles.

He was married in 1869 or 1870 to Marie Ruellan of Paris, France. On July 26, 1875, their only daughter, Mathilde or Matilda, was born in the United States Hotel, of which her father was the owner.

In a will, he bequeathed his estate, valued at $400,000, to his wife and his daughter.

Politics

In 1865 Hammel was elected to the first Kern County Board of Supervisors upon that area's organization as a county., In that capacity he was noted for "saving the Westlake Park to the city, and was also prominently connected with obtaining the water right of the Los Feliz rancho for 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. the leading hotel in Los Angeles, ) 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."

In 1889 Denker and Hammel donated a 30-foot right-of-way over the rancho to the Los Angeles and Pacific Railway, which was building a line to Santa Monica, "in return for ten-year passes on the railroad and the promise to build a depot and two flag-stops on the ranch."

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.