When Emperor Norton Became Protector of Mexico

October 18, 2024 / John Lumea

A certain conventional wisdom holds that Emperor Norton adopted the title "Protector of Mexico" around the time French emperor Napoleon III invaded Mexico in 1862 and installed his puppet ruler Maximilian I in 1864 — and that the Emperor dropped his "Protector" title a few years later.

The documentary record says otherwise.

Evidence suggests that Emperor Norton did not start using "Protector of Mexico" until early 1866, more than halfway into Maximilian’s tenure, but makes clear that he kept using the title — both to advocate for Mexico and for general purposes — for the rest of his life.

A surprising find: Norton I expanded his title to "Emperor of the United States and Mexico" in 1861.

By the time the Emperor assumed his protectorship of Mexico, he had relinquished his emperorship of that country.

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categories / Research, Proclamations, Original sources
tags / Mexico, Emperor of the United States and Mexico, Protector of Mexico, Napoleon III, Maximilian I, Robert Ernest Cowan, Albert Dressler, Allen Stanley Lane, William Drury, Emperor Norton Memorial Association, Woodlawn Cemetery, headstone, 1860, 1861, 1862, 1864, 1865, 1866, 1871, 1874, 1875, 1876, 1879, 1923, 1927, 1934, 1938, 1939, 1986

Emperor Norton at Sorbier's

June 16, 2024 / John Lumea

The San Francisco Examiner's 9 January 1880 obituary of Emperor Norton noted that "[h]is living was very inexpensive. He occupied a cheap room and boarded at cheap restaurants."

We recently discovered two sources that point to what appears to be a generations-forgotten association of the Emperor with such a spot: his breakfast patronage of Sorbier's Restaurant, on Commercial Street, less than a block from his own residence on Commercial.

Both sources are written by people who were in San Francisco during Emperor Norton's lifetime: The first is the Japan Weekly Mail's February 1880 obituary of the Emperor — the second, an article of reminiscences published in a San Francisco-based scientific journal in May 1910.

Read on for the full story.

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categories / Research, Original sources, Places
tags / Sorbier's Restaurant, Jules E. Sorbier, Jules Sorbier, International Restaurant, Occidental Restaurant, Commercial Street, Sacramento Street, Washington Street, Merchant Street, breakfast, Louise Bacon Sorbier, menu, photograph, Japan Weekly Mail, Mining and Scientific Press, San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, Samuel Williams, 1862, 1863, 1867, 1868, 1869, 1870, 1871, 1872, 1874, 1875, 1877, 1880, 1910

Emperor Norton on the Crest of the Farmers Market Wave

February 24, 2024 / John Lumea

For many years, Italian produce farmers in San Francisco had set up a vegetable market on Sansome Street between Clay and Washington. But, in late 1873, things were coming to a head in a long-simmering public dispute about whether the market should be allowed to stay there — and, if not, where it should go.

In November 1873, Emperor Norton weighed in with a Proclamation calling for the market to be moved from Sansome, a public street, to a new purpose-created public square next door.

In effect, the Emperor was seeking to establish the farmers market as a public institution in San Francisco.

This is one of many reasons why the San Francisco Ferry Building clock tower — which rises above what today is the city’s flagship farmers market, at the Ferry Building — should be named EMPEROR NORTON TOWER.

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categories / Research, Original sources, Proclamations
tags / vegetable, produce, vegetable market, produce market, Italian, Sansome Street, Market Street, farmers market, public market, Daily Alta California, San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, 1871, 1873, 1874

Celebrated Humorist in 1871: Emperor Norton Is Among “The Geniuses That Frisco Has Sent Broadcast to the World"

January 22, 2024 / John Lumea

In June 1849, English-born composer, singer, dramatic recitalist, impressionist, travel writer, and humorist Stephen Charnock Massett (1819–1898) gave a performance at a schoolhouse on Portsmouth Plaza, San Francisco, that is credited as the first professional show in the city.

Twenty-two years later, Massett was a bonafide national, international — and San Francisco-identified — celebrity who went by his pen and stage name “Jeems Pipes, of Pipesville.”

In April 1871, while Massett was living in San Francisco, the city’s Daily Alta newspaper published a column of his, in which he characterized the Emperor Norton as one of “the geniuses that Frisco has sent broadcast to the world.”

The other cultural exports on Massett’s list include Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Charles Warren Stoddard.

Read on to learn more about the fascinating Stephen Massett and his 1871 column giving props to the Emperor.

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categories / Research, Original sources
tags / Stephen Charnock Massett, Stephen C. Massett, Stephen Massett, Jeems Pipes of Pipesville, Jeems Pipes, Pipesville, Daily Alta California, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Charles Warren Stoddard, Frisco, Portsmouth Square, 1849, 1854, 1868, 1871

Beinecke Library and The Emperor Norton Trust Partner to Correct Description of Carte de Visite

April 14, 2023 / John Lumea

At the suggestion and request of The Emperor Norton Trust, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University has corrected its description of a carte de visite photograph by Jacob Shew that was misidentified as being possibly of Emperor Norton.

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categories / Research, News
tags / carte de visite, photograph, Jacob Shew, Beinecke Library, Yale University, Carl Mautz, catalog, record, correction, update, 1860, 1867, 1868, 1869, 1870, 1871

The Sporting Emperor Norton

March 28, 2023 / John Lumea

Emperor Norton tried his hand at riding a bike — roller skating — even jumping rope.

Later, the Emperor was a regular attendee at everything from horse races to endurance walking marathons to wrestling tournaments.

Here’s a first effort at documenting an underappreciated “sporting” thread in the Emperor’s story.

This includes:

many new details about known episodes (velocipede; skating), 1869–72
several new episodes, 1873–79

Also includes documentation of what may be the last reported sighting of Emperor Norton.

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categories / Research, Places, Original sources
tags / sport, tournament, race, competition, feat, amusement, Mechanics' Pavilion, Union Hall, Woodward's Gardens, Badger's Grand Central Park, Bay District Fair Ground, Platt's Music Hall, Platt's Hall, velocipede, boneshaker, roller skating, skates, jump rope, horse race, walking, wrestling, rink, pavilion, Eadweard Muybridge, Carleton Watkins, John Armstrong, 1869, 1870, 1871, 1872, 1873, 1874, 1879

Emperor Norton at Swimley's

February 24, 2023 / John Lumea

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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categories / Research, Original sources, Places
tags / Sacramento, Cincinnati Restaurant, Charles Franklin Swimley, Charles F. Swimley, Swimley's, Swimley's Boarders, 21 K Street, 25 K Street, Second Street, Verandah Hotel, Union Hotel, James Lansing, Union Hotel annex, restaurant, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, 1850, 1852, 1853, 1855, 1856, 1858, 1859, 1861, 1863, 1864, 1865, 1866, 1867, 1871, 1873, 1879, 1940, 1960, 1980s

Emperor Norton’s Residence, the Eureka Lodgings, Was Not Located (Exactly) Where You Think It Was

September 26, 2022 / John Lumea

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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categories / Research, Original sources, Places
tags / Eureka Lodgings, 624 Commercial, A. Lietz Company, William Meakin, machine shop, Grabhorn Press, Empire Day, United States Sub-Treasury, 612 Commercial, San Francisco Morning Call, Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain, The Hebrew, Philo Jacoby, Ernest Jacoby, Bret Harte, Eadweard Muybridge, panorama, Allen Hancock Knight, Treu Ergeben Hecht, T.E. Hecht, Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, Sanborn map, block map, 1853, 1864, 1865, 1871, 1872, 1877, 1878, 1880, 1887, 1892, 1894, 1905, 1906, 1907, 1918, 1990, 2000, Empire House

Emperor Norton's Proclamations on the Chinese, 1868–1878

March 14, 2022 / John Lumea

One of Emperor Norton’s most abiding concerns during his reign, 1859–1880, was the unjust treatment of the Chinese. For a period of more than a decade during the second half of his reign, the Emperor flagged his opposition to discrimination against the Chinese in the courts, the workplace and society — and to the physical violence that self-empowered demagogues and thugs on the West Coast meted out on Chinese during the 1860s and ‘70s.

Here, as a resource, are the published Proclamations of Emperor Norton on the Chinese that we’ve discovered so far — as they originally appeared in the papers of the Emperor’s time. There are thirteen Proclamations — plus a reference to a fourteenth.

Almost certainly, this is not an exhaustive list. Many, many issues of newspapers from this period are lost. And, even for the many scanned issues that are included in the current digital databases, the limitations of optical character recognition (OCR) technology mean that even searches on obvious terms like “Norton,” “Emperor,” “Chinese” and “China” don’t produce every possible result.

We’ll continue to add to this list as new information comes to light.

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categories / Research, Original sources, Proclamations
tags / China, Chinese, immigration, courts, labor, society, Denis Kearney, 1868, 1870, 1871, 1872, 1873, 1874, 1875, 1876, 1878

The Emperor of Brooklyn, Part 2

February 18, 2022 / John Lumea

In 2015, we published a piece, “The Emperor of Brooklyn,” about Emperor Norton’s connection to Brooklyn, Calif., an area southeast of Lake Merritt, in Oakland, that was an independent township from 1856 until it was annexed to Oakland in late 1872.

The main documentary evidence for this connection was a couple of Proclamations that were published in the San Francisco-based Pacific Appeal. The Emperor had designated the Appeal his as his “imperial gazette” in December 1870 — and, ultimately, the paper published some 250 of his Proclamations. But, these particular Proclamations were datelined “Brooklyn.”

It turns out that these and other Proclamations were published simultaneously — sometimes originally — in a short-lived Brooklyn weekly called the Brooklyn Home Journal and Alameda County Advertiser.

Read on to learn about this newspaper; exactly where it was located; Emperor Norton’s visits to the paper’s offices; and the respect the paper paid to the Emperor in 1872.

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categories / Research, Original sources, Places, Proclamations
tags / Brooklyn Calif., Oakland, Brooklyn Home Journal, Brooklyn Hall, Walker Street, Thirteenth Avenue, Jackson Street, Eleventh Street, 1871, 1872, 1873

Emperor Norton & The Great Unknown: Two Eccentrics Meet in a Rare Illustration from 1871

May 15, 2019 / John Lumea

By the time Max Cohnheim arrived in San Francisco in 1867, at around age 41 — Cohnheim had immigrated to the United States in 1851 — he already was a noted German-language writer, editor, playwright and sometime actor of political satire.

On 17 June 1871, Cohnheim debuted his latest satirical magazine, the San Francisco Humorist. The inaugural issue featured a comic illustration of the Emperor Norton conferring with another well-known street character of the day — a dandy who styled himself The Great Unknown.

It seems likely that the Emperor and the Unknown at least would have been acquainted with one another.

Read on to learn more about the Great Unknown and to see this early illustration of Emperor Norton — an illustration, drawn during the Emperor’s lifetime, that probably has lain in obscurity for decades and probably has seen by very few people at all since it first was published nearly 150 years ago.

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categories / Original sources, ARENA, Research
tags / San Francisco Humorist, Max Cohnheim, The Great Unknown, Friedrich Wilhelm Frohm, William Fromm, Charles Fromm, George Daniels Morse, Morse's Palace of Art, California Theater, William Horace Lindgard, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, Kathleen Neils Conzen, comic, 1871

Emperor Norton at a Pro-Civil Rights Lecture, March 1868

February 24, 2019 / John Lumea

Emperor Norton’s on-point attendance at an early event of the Order of Freedom’s Defenders — a Unionist-Republican political club dedicated to preserving Lincoln's legacy; advancing Reconstruction; electing Grant as President; and securing the Constitutional protections necessary to guarantee the civil rights of African-Americans — can be seen as “of a piece” with the Emperor’s broader commitment to African-American equality.

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categories / Original sources, Places, Research
tags / Order of Freedom's Defenders, General Oscar Hugh La Grange, Platt's Music Hall, Union, Republican, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Reconstruction, civil rights, San Francisco Examiner, Peter Anderson, Fifteenth Amendment, Pacific Appeal, Proclamations, 1868, 1869, 1871, 1874

Emperor Norton, c.1871–72

June 27, 2017 / John Lumea

A little more than half of the 17 extant photographs of Emperor Norton have reliable dates attached. In this context, "date" means year.

Armed with one historical lead, a good set of links to early San Francisco directories, some basic detective skills and a little patience, we set out to pin down the date of a well-known photograph of Emperor Norton that had no date.

We found it.

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categories / Original sources, Research
tags / photograph, photography, Tuttle & Johnson, William Nutting Tuttle, Charles Wallace Jacob Johnson, Cosmopolitan Art Gallery, 1871, 1872

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