Francis I. duPont & Co. Genealogy: Part XI

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William R. Staats & Co.
Ford Motor Company Syndicate #76
Founded 1888*, Pasadena, California

Origins

William R. Staats (1867-1928) was the descendant of Major Abraham Staats (1618-1683), a Dutch immigrant who came to the New World in 1642, and the son of a minister. In 1886, Staats traveled to Pasadena, CA from his home in Glastonbury, CT. Just 19 years old, Staats had been suffering from a lung illness for three years and had tried and failed to regain his health in Florida. His parents were advised by Dr. Alfred Loomis, a New York lung specialist, that he might survive his illness if he made it to California. Staat's former teacher at the Wesleyan Academy (MA), Prof. Charles M. Parker, had traveled to California to recover his own health and had settled in Pasadena. With the financial assistance of his father's congregation, Staats made the journey to Pasadena and boarded with a Mr. Meharry, who was secretary of the Lake Vineyard Land and Water Company at which Parker was a director.

Leggett & Staats (founded 1888)
William R. Staats, Broker (1888)*
William R. Staats & Co., Inc. (founded 1894)

According to Staats's niece and biographer, Carol Green Wilson (1892-1981), Staats began working at Wood & Banbury, a realty firm, in 1887, and then entered into a partnership for a new real estate firm called Leggett & Staats in 1888. Though Leggett soon headed back East (he was originally from Hudson, New York), Staats continued in the real estate business presumably under his own name. By 1889, he was advertising the services of William R. Staats, broker in real estate and loans. Though most histories of the firm, including the firm's company history, identify 1887 as the date William R. Staat's & Co. was founded, given that Wilson had access to Staat's family papers and diary, it is highly probable that 1887 is just an indicator of the year that Staats went into business in California. What is known for sure is that the firm of William R. Staats & Co. was incorporated in 1894. According to the firm's history, it was "the first investment house to be chartered in the State of California." The first directors of the firm included Staats, his older brother, Henry T. Staats, and his younger brother, Hiram A. Staats. The brothers and their father, Rev. Henry T. Staats, had moved to California after their mother, Mary, died in Connecticut in 1888. Their sister, Mary, had already joined Staats in 1887. (Carol Green Wilson was Mary Staats's daughter.)

Professor Parker described California to Staats as a place that "geographically...has an existence and character of its own." Despite having contracted typhoid and pneumonia in 1893, Staats was able to avail himself of all of the opportunities that California presented, and as southern California developed, particularly in the areas of land and power, so did his firm. In 1896, the firm became an underwriter of the Westside Lighting Company, which became the Southern California Edison Company. In 1900, the year he married Helen Isabel Watson, he became a charter member of the Los Angeles Stock Exchange. In 1901, his company completed the first public financing for the Union Oil Company and the Bakersfield and Kern River Railroad and completed the sale of the bonds for the San Joaquin Light and Power Corporation. While every venture was not successful and the economic booms came and went, Staats's firm's capital stock grew from $50,000 in 1894 to $200,000 by 1903. By 1904, in addition to being the head of his own firm, Staats was the director of 10 companies ranging from ice, oil, telephone and telegraph, water, power, toll road, title and trusts. As stated by Wilson, "Billy Staats had not only lived to reach the magic land; but he was now joining hands with leading men in every phase of its development."

Los Angeles, 1909. Image courtesy Library of Congress.

In 1905, Staats opened an office in Los Angeles, which was managed by John Earle Jardine, a retired orchardist and president of the Southern California Citrus Fruit Exchange. In 1920, when Staats retired from the firm because of his health, Jardine assumed leadership of the firm. Born in New York City and the son of a Scottish-born architect, John Earle Jardine (1871-1956) visited California in 1892, and he was so impressed that he returned to Pasadena in 1893 to settle down and marry. His wife, Mary C. Peck, was from a pioneer California family and the daughter of George Peck, the president of the Bank of San Pedro. By the time Jardine became the head of the firm, Staats & Co. had expanded "its personnel and facilities to meet the increasing financial requirements of [California's] rapidly advancing community." It opened a San Francisco office in 1911. During World War I, the firm distributed millions of dollars of government bonds during the Liberty Loan drive.

Before the Great Depression, the firm reorganized its areas of concentration and expanded by taking over other firms. In 1916, Staats & Co. separated the real estate side of the business from the investments. The real estate and insurance business was moved to a new firm, Staats-Macy Company, under the directorship of Lloyd R. Macy (d. 1924), who was the secretary of the Staats & Co. Pasadena office. In 1921, William Wilson (d. 1954), an Irish immigrant who joined the Staats firm in 1909 after moving to Pasadena for his health, bought the firm and renamed it William Wilson Co., while William R. Staats continued to concentrate on the investment of stocks and bonds. In 1929, the firm took over the firm of Hammond Brothers, Inc. (founded 1912, Los Angeles), an investment brokerage. The two principals, Paul B. and Theodore E. Hammond, who were the sons of W.T.S. Hammond, the former vice president and cashier of the First National Bank of Los Angeles, joined the firm. By 1932, the firm had established its reputation as a corporate and municipal underwriter for western industrial development. It was "intimately associated" with the development of the "Southern California Edison, Union Oil, San Joaquin Light and Power, Southern California Telephone, California Portland Cement... and the municipalities of Pasadena, Inglewood, Santa Ana, Monrovia, Oceanside and Tropico."


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