# Claus Spreckels

Adolph Claus J. Spreckels (July 9, 1828 – December 26, 1908) was a German-born major industrialist in both California and Hawaii during the kingdom and republican periods of the islands' history. Spreckels founded or was involved in several enterprises, most notably the company that bears his name, Spreckels Sugar Company.

## Early life and family

Spreckels was born in Lamstedt, in the Kingdom of Hanover, a constituent kingdom of the German Confederation. Spreckels was the eldest of six children of the farmer John Diederich Spreckels (1802–1873) and his wife Gesche Baak (1804–1875), a family that had occupied a homestead in Lamstedt for many generations. He grew up in Lamstedt and attended elementary school. After the bad harvests of 1845 and 1846, the resulting inflation and hunger crisis reached its peak in 1847; Spreckels emigrated to the United States in 1848 at the age of 19 to start a new life, with only one German thaler in his pocket, which upon arrival in the US, he exchanged for 75 cents. (Equivalent to about $30 in 2023 dollars.) Spreckels settled in Charleston, South Carolina, working as a grocery clerk, taking over the grocery after a year and a half by buying it on credit from the retiring shop owner.$^{:21}$
In 1852, he married his childhood sweetheart, Anna Christina Mangels (September 4, 1830 in Ankelohe [de], Kingdom of Hanover, German Confederation – February 15, 1910, San Francisco, California), who had immigrated to New York City with her brother three years earlier.$^{:21}$ They had 13 children, five of whom lived to maturity: sons John Diedrich (1853–1926), Adolph Bernard (1857–1924), Claus August ("Gus"; 1858–1946), and Rudolph (1872–1958); and daughter, Emma Claudina (1870–1924), who married Watson Ferris Hutton. The remaining children died in childhood, in several cases, within a few months of each other, either from diphtheria or from other unspecified pandemic diseases, possibly cholera.$^{:27}$

## In California
### Early business ventures

In 1854, Claus and his family left Charleston for New York City, where he operated a grocery with his brother-in-law, Claus Mangels. In 1855, he was visited by his younger brother Bernhard, who operated a grocery store in San Francisco and was en route back to their home town of Lamstedt to marry. Bernhard regaled Claus with stories about the city and its booming post-Gold Rush economy. Already disliking New York City and sensing an opportunity, Spreckels soon sold his share of the grocery business there to his brother-in-law and bought out Bernhard's grocery business in San Francisco, relocating there with his family in 1856. After about a year of operating a successful grocery, he again grew restless with the lack of growth opportunity in that line of business. Selling the grocery, he partnered again with Claus Mangels and with a younger brother, Peter Spreckels, to start a brewery.$^{:22}$

### Sugar King of California

Spreckels entered the sugar business in the mid-1860s and came to dominate the Hawaiian sugar trade on the West Coast. His first refinery, built in 1867, was at Eighth and Brannan Streets in San Francisco, but by the late 1870s, the Brannan Street facilities were running at capacity, so Spreckels chose a site in Potrero Point to open a larger sugar refinery with water access. He called his concerns the California Sugar Refinery.
Spreckels used some of his wealth to purchase, beginning in 1872, the former Mexican land grant Rancho Aptos, a large tract of ranch and timber land in Aptos, California. He built a large resort hotel, and not far away, an extensive ranch complex. Spreckels was one of the original investors in the Santa Cruz Railroad, which began operation in 1875 and passed through his land on its run between Santa Cruz and Watsonville. On the Aptos ranch, Spreckels began to experiment with growing sugar beets. He induced others in the area to plant sugar beets, as well, and built the Soquel Beet Root Sugar Company, a small refinery in nearby Soquel in 1874, where it operated for five years.
In 1888, Spreckels established the Western Beet Sugar Company in Watsonville, which was at that time the largest beet sugar factory in the U.S. By 1890, his main growing operations had shifted to the Salinas Valley, so he built the 42-mile narrow-gauge Pajaro Valley Consolidated Railroad to ship his sugar beets from the fields near Salinas to Watsonville.
In 1899, Spreckels opened an even larger factory closer to the main sugar-beet fields. He named the new factory Spreckels Sugar Company. A company town grew up around the plant, and still exists as Spreckels, California. The town and the sugar factory were important in the early life of novelist John Steinbeck, and several scenes from his novels take place there.$^{:301-303}$

## In Hawaii

Spreckels' interest in Hawaii's sugar industry began in 1876. Prior to that time, Spreckels had opposed the Reciprocity Treaty of 1875, which increased the Kingdom of Hawaii's access to the American sugar market, because he feared that the low tariffs on Hawaiian sugar would hurt his business. However, Spreckels eventually decided to establish his own plantations in Hawaii and traveled there one year later.
In 1878, Spreckels founded Spreckelsville, a company town along the northern shore of Maui. To do so, he purchased and leased 40,000 acres (160 km$^2$) of land. That same year, Spreckels incorporated the Hawaiian Commercial Company with Hermann Schussler, a San Francisco area engineer best known for overseeing construction of the Crystal Springs Reservoir. In 1882, the company was reincorporated as the Hawaiian Commercial and Sugar Company (HC&S). By 1892, Spreckelsville was the largest sugarcane plantation in the world and employed thousands of immigrant farm laborers from Japan, Korea, China, and other countries.
Spreckels became friends with Walter M. Gibson, adviser to King Kalākaua. Together, they made arrangements where Spreckels would lend the king money and in return, Gibson and he would increase the Spreckels' land holdings and water rights. However, Spreckels fell out of Kalākaua's favor in 1886.
He purchased the Pacific Commercial Advertiser in Hawaii in 1880 and became a publisher. This paper later became known as the Honolulu Advertiser, and prior to its demise in 2010, became one of the largest newspapers in circulation in the United States. Spreckels' conservative, pro-monarchy slant caused him to fall from favor in the business community, and he eventually sold the newspaper.
Claus Spreckels also lent his assistance to William Matson when he first founded Matson Navigation Company. Matson had been captain of a vessel, engaged chiefly in carrying coal to the Spreckels sugar refinery. Spreckels financed many of Matson's new ships, including Matson's first ship, called Emma Claudina and named for Spreckels' daughter.
In 1893, following a bitter lawsuit that pitted him against his two youngest sons, Gus and Rudolph, as well as the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, which he opposed, Claus Spreckels handed off his Hawaii properties and businesses to his business partner William G. Irwin and his two eldest sons, John and Adolph, with the intention of focusing his resources on his beet sugar business in California. Viewed as an opponent of the newly-established Provisional Government of Hawaii, on July 9, 1893, Spreckels found a death threat graffitied on his house and went into self-exile from Hawaii on July 19.$^{:239-244}$ He left on the SS Australia, vowing to "return to see grass growing in the streets of Honolulu." Spreckels returned only once to Hawaii, in 1905.$^{:255-256}$
Infighting between his sons and their waning interests in their Hawaiian businesses led to the dissolution of the Spreckels family businesses over the following decades and their takeover by Hawaii's emerging Big Five sugar companies. Following a brief takeover by Gus and Rudolph, the Hawaiian Commercial and Sugar Company and Spreckelsville were taken over by Alexander & Baldwin in 1898, and the remaining Irwin and Spreckels businesses merged into C. Brewer & Co. in 1909.

## Later businesses in California

In the 1890s, Spreckels helped found the national sugar trust and renamed his San Francisco property the Western Sugar Refinery, and continued to increase his control over the Hawaiian sugar trade. This control over the industry was irksome to Hawaiian planters not directly affiliated with Spreckels and his associates. At the end of the 1890s, they attempted to break free. In 1905, the planters established a cooperative refinery in Crockett, California, the California and Hawaiian Sugar Company (C&H). The Spreckels dominance in sugar was broken, but the Western Sugar Refinery continued operation in San Francisco until 1951.
Spreckels was the president of the San Francisco and San Joaquin Valley Railroad, which was founded in 1895 and sold to the Santa Fe Railway in 1900. The railroad built a line that competed with the Southern Pacific through the San Joaquin Valley between Richmond and Bakersfield. The railroad was welcome competition for shippers who were strangled by Southern Pacific's monopoly on shipping rates in the valley. Today, this route is BNSF's main route to Northern California.

## Controversies

Spreckels had an often-contentious relationship with other powerful business figures and interests, both in the United States and in the Kingdom of Hawai'i. This was reflected in frequent negative publicity for Spreckels, particularly in the often yellow press that characterized much of American journalism of that era. One such rivalry would grow into a family enmity between Claus Spreckels and his sons and Charles and M. H. de Young, owners of the San Francisco Chronicle, culminating in the attempted assassination of M. H. de Young by Adolph B. Spreckels in 1884. Allegations by the Chronicle and other critics included the claim that he practiced slavery on his Hawaiian plantations, that he acted as a pimp for King Kalākaua, and that he had defrauded stockholders in his company.

### Allegations of slavery on Hawaii plantations

Like other owners of sugar plantations in Hawaii prior to American annexation, Spreckels employed laborers on the contract labor system, a system having some features of indentured servitude, in which an immigrant laborer contracted to work for a single employer for a set period (typically 3-5 years) for a low wage as repayment for the cost of passage to Hawaii. Spreckels was a strong advocate for continuation of this system, arguing that sugar could not be produced economically without a reliable supply of cheap labor. This led him to oppose the annexation of Hawaii by the United States, something that was supported by many powerful Americans in Hawaii, as the use of contract labor was illegal in the United States under the 1885 Alien Contract Labor Law and other laws.
In the 1880s, the Chronicle began running articles alleging that the laborers on Spreckels plantations were effectively enslaved, that his plantations engaged in unacceptable labor practices, and that the living conditions of the laborers were inhumane, with some of this coverage getting attention in the larger national press. The majority of San Francisco newspapers of the era, however, did not endorse the Chronicle's reporting on the issue, claiming that the labor conditions on Spreckels plantations were acceptable and, in fact, much better than those on sugar plantations in the Caribbean, a position later supported by independent investigations by the Portuguese and Norwegian governments.

#### Coercion of Puerto Rican laborers

Negative publicity about Spreckels Hawaiian operations continued to follow him even after the divestment of his Hawaiian operations in 1893. In 1900, an incident took place in which 114 Puerto Rican migrant laborers were transported to Hawaii under coercive and inhumane conditions. News of the plight of these laborers as they were being transported to California for shipment to Hawaii became a cause célèbre in the American press, particularly in San Francisco. The laborers were recruited and trafficked by labor agents who, according to most accounts, were hired by the Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association, though some stories linked the agents to Claus Spreckels. John D. Spreckels issued a statement via his newspaper, the San Francisco Call, claiming that neither he nor Claus Spreckels had anything to do with the recruitment of these laborers.

## Death

Spreckels died on December 26, 1908, in San Francisco, and was interred in the Spreckels Mausoleum at Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma. His second son, Adolph, and his daughter-in-law, Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, were later interred there after their deaths.

## Legacy

On Claus Spreckels's death, his son Adolph assumed the management of Spreckels Sugar Company. The company remained under control of Claus Spreckels descendants until a 1949 buyout by Charles Edouard de Bretteville, a relative of Adolph's wife, Alma de Bretteville Spreckels. The de Bretteville family sold their interest in 1963 and it passed out of the family entirely. As of 2025, Spreckels Sugar Company is still in business, owned by the Southern Minnesota Beet Sugar Cooperative. The company is headquartered in Brawley, California in the Imperial Valley and operates a beet sugar factory there. It currently sells granulated sugar in bulk to the food and beverage industry, with a secondary business in beet molasses and beet pulp that is sold for commercial yeast manufacture and for animal feed.
The Hawaiian Commercial and Sugar Company (HC&S) continued operation as a division of Alexander & Baldwin (A&B) for over a century after Spreckels left the company. In 1902, HC&S closed the Spreckelsville mill and moved its main operations to Puʻunene. Later in the century, A&B would sell of the valuable coastal land on which Spreckelsville was situated for real estate development and the unincorporated community of Spreckelsville still exists as a community. The original California HC&S corporation incorporated by Spreckels and Schussler in 1878 was formally dissolved and then reincorporated in Hawaii in 1926. The company shut down operations entirely in 2016, by which time it had been the last remaining sugar producer in Hawaii.
In 1899, Spreckels gave the city of San Francisco a classical-style outdoor music structure (known as "the bandshell") to frame one end of the Music Concourse in Golden Gate Park. The official name of the structure is the Spreckels Temple of Music.
A number of streets in Aptos, California, are named either for Claus Spreckels or for parts of his once-extensive estate. In addition to Spreckels Drive and Claus Lane, Polo Drive runs along one side of what was once Spreckels' polo field, now a Santa Cruz County park named Polo Grounds Park. A shopping center called Deer Park Shopping Center sits at the edge of a formerly wooded Spreckels-owned area used by hotel guests and visitors.
Other naming tributes to the Spreckels family include:
* Spreckels, California, named for Claus Spreckels
* Sprecks Beach, which is north of Spreckelsville
* Spreckels Lake on the northern side of Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, named for Claus Spreckels and his family
* The Claus-Spreckels-Straße (street) in Lamstedt (Germany) named for Claus Spreckels