Santa
Clara County
Biographies
HENRY
RENGSTORFF
HENRY RENGSTORFF. Not one, but six valuable and well improved
farms represent the accumulation of Henry Rengstorff,
a California pioneer of 1850, and a land owner of Santa Clara county since
1853. More than half a century of life
in the west has shown this honored resident to be a man of resource and
adaptability, for he came here with his German tongue unmixed with English, and
with comparatively little in the way of financial encouragement. He had a mind well stored with the practical
and homely maxims of the German people, and his youth had been spent in an
atmosphere of refinement and with more or less chance of studying human
nature. His father, Fritz Rengstorff, was an educator, and also the owner and
proprietor of a tavern on a country road in Farge and
Blumenthal, Hanover, Germany, a few miles from the seaport town of Bremen. His mother, formerly Amelia Hambruch, was also born in Germany, and in her life
preserved the characteristic of longevity in the family, attaining to the age
of ninety-four years. Fritz Rengstorff lived to be sixty-six years old and had, besides
Henry, one son, Fritz, and two daughters.
Henry was born near Bremen September 29, 1829, and was the second
in the family.
Possibly the close proximity to Bremen,
from whence departed so many ships to foreign ports, inspired in Henry Rengstorff a desire to sail toward the horizon, and in a
newer country hew out a fortune from raw materials. At any rate, the spring of 1850 found him
afloat in a sailer, bound for San Francisco by way of
Cape Horn. From San Francisco he came to
Santa Clara county and worked on farms in the
neighborhood of San Jose until 1853, when he purchased a squatter’s right to
two hundred and ninety acres of Silver Creek and engaged in general farming and
stock-raising until 1856. His next
squatter’s right was of two hundred and ninety acres near his present farm, and
in 1864 he bought his home place of one hundred and sixty-four acres, one and a
half miles north of Mountainview. His home farm is devoted to grain and hay, as
is also a farm of two hundred and twenty-seven acres near Milpitas. A farm of one hundred and seventeen acres on
the San Francisco road, near Oak Grove, is under fruit, and a farm of twelve
hundred acres in the Alpine district, San Mateo county,
is under grain and general produce. He
also owns a ranch upon which is built Rengstorff’s
Landing, and a half interest in a ranch of five hundred and twenty acres east
of San Jose. With the exception of his
home place, he rents all of his farms, and latterly his son Henry has taken the
responsibility of the Rengstorff Landing and assumed
the management of the warehouse. Besides
Henry he has three older children, of whom John is engaged in mining at Cape
Nome, Alaska; Alice is now Mrs. Haag and resides at Oak Grove; and
Christine F. is the wife of Robert McMillan of San Francisco. Three children are deceased: Mrs. Mary Martell; Mrs. Helena Ascum; and Charles William, who was four years old. In San Jose Mr. Rengstorff
married Christine Hessler, a native of Germany, and
who has lived to share his opulence and well earned good fortune. Both are members of the Presbyterian Church
of Mountainview, toward the support of which
Mr. Rengstorff is a liberal contributor. Since his arrival in California he has
striven to establish a school system of merit in his neighborhood, served as
school director for many years and erected the school house in the Wisman district. A
temperate and well balanced life have left him full of years and in the
enjoyment of his unimpaired faculties, while his success as a farmer and
business man has made possible the comforts and even luxuries which were
strangers to his youth. He is esteemed
as an example of the straightforward and industrious German-American, whose
perseverance and thrift have been a natural heritage and who has steadfastly
worked to realize his worthy and practical ambitions.
Transcribed by Donna Toole.
Source: History
of the State of California & Biographical Record of Coast Counties,
California by Prof. J. M. Guinn, A. M., Pages 434-435. The Chapman
Publishing Co., Chicago, 1904.
© 2015 Donna Toole.