Even at the most storied research libraries and historical societies, the catalog records for artifacts like early photographs — including basic details like the date and the photographer — can be notoriously unreliable.
Often, these records were created decades, even a century or more, ago — long before the advent of library science as a professional research discipline — and have not been reassessed or updated since then. Digitized, perhaps, but basically fossilized and forgotten. What this means for researchers is that catalog info can be little more than a starting point.
For the last decade, The Emperor Norton Trust has used 1864 as the date for two photographs of the Emperor that appear to have been taken during the same sitting. The date was from the catalog record of a major research institution — and, based on a variety of contextual factors, it was the only credible citation we were able to find.
Recently, we noted that the institution has removed this citation. This, together with our discovery of a new piece of evidence potentially relating to the photographs, prompted us to take a second look at the date question.
As a result of our investigation, we have revised our date for these photos.
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Although Joshua Norton was perfectly serious in declaring himself Emperor in 1859, it generally is agreed that the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin published his original Proclamation as a joke.
It didn’t take long for other newspapers — in San Francisco, yes, but eventually across California and Nevada — to get in on the game of burlesquing the Emperor with fake stories about — and fake proclamations by — him.
William Drury may have been the first, in his 1986 biography of the Emperor, to point out that the Daily Alta California — in particular, the Alta’s city editor Albert S. Evans, pen name "Fitz Smythe" — was the real "pacesetter" in this, taking the mantle from the Bulletin and fully milking the comic potential of the Emperor’s persona.
Recently, I stumbled upon a couple of pieces of evidence — not mentioned in Drury’s account — that other newspapers at the time recognized the Daily Alta and Evans as tops in the field!
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Contemporaneous reports of two visits of Emperor Norton to Sacramento, separated by a decade — one visit in January 1864; another in December 1873 — point to the Emperor’s abiding and strengthening belief in the power of national government to produce national unity — to the point of making state governments, and states themselves, irrelevant.
On the 1864 visit, the Emperor issued a Proclamation that The Emperor Norton Trust has not seen mentioned elsewhere. We’ll call it a discovery!
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Although national awareness of Emperor Norton did increase during the 20-year period of his reign — especially after 1870 — it remains the case the virtually all of the press mentions of the Emperor between his self-declaration in September 1859 and his death in January 1880 are from newspapers in California and Nevada.
It appears that fewer than 100 mentions of Emperor Norton during this 20-year period were published in papers outside these two states.
But, within this “national” group of papers outside California and Nevada…
Some 20–25% of the newspaper coverage of the Emperor can be attributed to reprints of an excerpt from a single article in 1875.
The article — written by a New York transplant and veteran editorial staffer of the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin who had arrived in San Francisco 10 years earlier — was published by New York-based Scribner’s Monthly.
The excerpt reached readers in 10 states.
Details and documentation inside.
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Announcement and details of the official dedication and celebration of “Emperor Norton Place” as the City and County of San Francisco’s commemorative name for the 600 block of Commercial Street, between Montgomery and Kearny Streets — where Emperor Norton is documented to have lived from sometime between summer 1864 and summer 1865 until his death in January 1880.
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Joshua Norton made many visits to Sacramento in the early 1850s.
But, after declaring himself Emperor in 1859, his first imperial visit to California’s capital was in December 1863.
By 1863, Emperor Norton already was becoming a legend.
And, on this 1863 visit, he is reported to have dined at a restaurant run by someone who was becoming a legend of his own.
The restaurant was the Cincinnati. The proprietor was William Swimley. And the eatery — known locally as “Swimley’s” — was half-way through a 20-year run as “oldest, neatest, best and cheapest” food spot in Sacramento.
The building where Swimley’s was located from c.1861 until its closing in 1871 occupies a fascinating place in the history of early Sacramento.
In the course of researching this wonderful story, we’ve found evidence that the building is older than has been believed.
Deep documentation and rare photographs included.
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When one reads that Emperor Norton lived in "the Eureka Lodgings" at "624 Commercial Street," it's tempting to imagine that the Eureka was in a building with one address and one use — and that the Eureka was it.
In fact: There were two buildings on the Eureka site between c.1850 and Emperor Norton's death in 1880, with the Eureka building arriving in 1857. Both buildings had three addresses and a variety of business tenants — with the second of the two buildings hosting the Eureka and two previous hotel/lodging establishments that each occupied only a portion of the top two floors.
At various times during the 1860s ― including while the Emperor was living here between 1864/65 and 1880 — the second building was home to some of the best-known and -respected businesses in early San Francisco history.
Both of the buildings on the Eureka site were located between Montgomery and Kearny Streets, with frontages on both Commercial and Clay Streets.
What follows is, we believe, the first published attempt to establish a "tenant timeline" of the Commercial Street frontages of these buildings between c.1850 and 1880.
Read on for some fascinating history — and some terrific advertisements!
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Over the last 25 years or so, a consensus has emerged among those attuned to San Francisco history — and particularly among Nortonophiles — that the former site of the Eureka Lodgings — where Emperor Norton is documented to have lived between 1864/1865 and his death in 1880 — is the privately owned public open space (POPOS) known as Empire Park, located at 642 Commercial Street between Montgomery and Kearny Streets.
That's been the consensus.
But, a careful analysis of two key bodies of evidence — (1) photographs of this stretch of Commercial Street taken between 1877 and 1906, and (2) Sanborn fire insurance and official San Francisco block (property) maps from the generation or two before and after the earthquake and fires of 1906 — reveal the Empire Park designation to be mistaken.
The Eureka Lodgings was located on Commercial Street between Montgomery and Kearny — just not on that site.
In the attached deeply researched and documented — and extensively illustrated — article, I provide:
1) Confirmation — for the first time, I believe — of the visual ID of the Eureka Lodgings building, using photographs from during and after Emperor Norton's lifetime. (Don’t miss the fabulous detail in these new hi-res scans from 1878, c.1892–94 and 1906 — worth the price of admission!)
2) A new location for the former site of the Eureka that better accords with the historical record.
It's a deep dive — so, pull up a chair!
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The received wisdom, since the time of Emperor Norton’s death in January 1880, has been that the Emperor lived at his final and most famous San Francisco residence — the Eureka Lodgings, at 624 Commercial Street between Montgomery and Kearny — “for seventeen years.”
That was the phrase that a number of San Francisco papers used in their obituaries and funeral notices. The most influential Norton biographers of the twentieth century extrapolated from this that the Emperor lived at the Eureka from 1863 to 1880. And, now, this claim is firmly ensconced as one of the most oft-invoked tenets of the biographical catechism of Norton I.
But, the directories of the period don’t support an 1863 arrival date.
Rather, they suggest that the Emperor might have taken up his room at the Eureka Lodgings as late as summer 1865.
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An extremely rare signed c.1864 Emperor Norton carte de visite is being auctioned right now via Bonhams.
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By the time the calendar opened on 1864, Emperor Norton was a well-known presence in San Francisco, as well in Oakland and Berkeley. And, he had begun making excursions to Sacramento.
But, it appears that the Emperor had yet to set foot in outposts of his Empire further afield.
Between mid February and mid March 1864, he remedied this with two royal junkets in quick succession — the first, to Marysville and Oroville; the second, to Petaluma.
Of course, the newspapers both at home and “abroad” were only too happy to cover these visits.
Read on for the whole story — and for rarely seen photographs of a couple of the hotels where Emperor Norton stayed when he visited these places.
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