Alameda County
Biographies
JOSEPH
RASPILLER
One of the leading industries of Berkeley is represented by the Raspiller Brewing Company, located on San Pablo avenue at the corner of Francisco street, an extensive plant occupying a lot with a frontage of two hundred and seventy-one feet, and one hundred and twenty-five feet deep. A force of thirteen men is employed and in 1903 eleven thousand barrels of beer were turned out. The founder and president of this company is Joseph Raspiler, a man well known in Berkeley, having been brewing master for the Landregan Brothers from 1885 to 1893, and whose success in the work is as much the result of early training as of later application.
He was born in Lorraine, France, in 1856, and remained at home until reaching the age of seventeen years, acquiring a practical education in the brewery which his father conducted in France. In 1873 he went to Switzerland, the first of a series of trips which gave him a broad knowledge of the geography of the world. After two years he returned to France and in 1877 went to Egypt, spending three years in a brewery there, when in 1881 he came to the United States and located in Rochester, N. Y., where he engaged in the brewery business. In the latter part of the same year he came to California and located in San Francisco, but a year later was called home to settle up the estate of his father. A year was passed in Europe when he once more crossed the ocean and going to Panama remained in that country for six months. Coming again to California he made San Francisco his home until 1885, when he came to Berkeley in the capacity of brewing master for Landregan Brothers, with whom he remained until 1893. May 7, 1893, he established the American Brewing Company, which has since grown to such remunerative proportions, and which, on April 11, 1902, was incorporated under the name of the Raspiller Brewing Company.
The marriage of Mr. Raspiller occurred in Oakland February 20, 1887, and united him with Theofila Stroinski, a native of Germany, and they are now the parents of three children, namely: Josephine, aged fifteen; Theofila, aged seven; and Noel, aged three and a half.
Transcribed
by: Cecelia M. Setty.
Source: History of the State of California &
Biographical Record of Coast Counties, California by Prof. J. M. Guinn, A.
M., Pages 703-704. The Chapman Publishing Co., Chicago, 1904.
© 2015 Cecelia M. Setty.
BACK TO GOLDEN NUGGET LIBRARY'S ALAMEDA DATABASES