HENRY SEARS BATES

San Francisco County

Biographies

HENRY SEARS BATES

BATES, HENRY SEARS (Bates & Chesebrough), Shipping and Commission, San Francisco, California, was born in San Rafael, that State, April 27, 1879, the son of Marshall Asha Bates and Elizabeth (Sears) Bates. He is of Virginian descent on his father’s side and of New England ancestry on the maternal side, his mother having been the daughter of Judge Sears, a jurist well known in the east. On March 18,1903, Mr. Bates married Miss Mary Gladys Merrill, in San Francisco, and to them there have been born three children: Merrill, Henry Sears, Jr., and Gerald Bates.

Mr. Bates received his early education at the Pacific Heights Grammar School and at the Broadway School, San Francisco; attended the Mount Tamalpais Academy in San Rafael and the Lowell High of San Francisco from 1891 to 1895, was graduated from Boone’s Academy, Berkeley, in 1897, and left the University of California in 1898, in his sophomore year, to engage in Mining in Mariposa and Calaveras counties. In 1900 he went to Nome, Alaska, where he roughed it for awhile, ran a boat on the Yukon and gained an experience valuable from both a physical and business viewpoint. Possibly the germ of his present large ideas of shipping and development was born in that Yukon venture and stimulated by his subsequent progress in the brokerage line. At all events, in 1901 he entered the marine brokerage business with M. A. Newell as an adjuster. Here he rapidly learned the details of the office, and in 1903 became a clerk in the firm of Johnson & Higgins, marine brokers, where he rose, in 1905, to the head of the adjusting department, a recognized authority on marine adjusting.

The February, 1911, number of “Ocean Travel and Traffic” contains an article by Mr. Bates, sketching the history of his company and indicating the “probable effects the Panama Canal will have upon California’s trade with the Gulf and Atlantic ports.” Excerpts from this contribution shed much interesting light upon the subject treated, as well as on Mr. Bates’ commercial intelligence. He tells us that in July, 1907, the firm “started in business and, naturally, owing to the previous experience of both partners, decided to confine itself to shipping and marine brokerage.” The positions previously held by Mr. Chesebrough and himself had given them an accurate knowledge of the trade by sea via the port of San Francisco, and had enabled them to perceive the great opportunities which the trade between Atlantic and Pacific ports offered young men of experience in the shipping business. They were “firmly convinced that the tonnage of our country had increased far beyond an equivalent to that of the sugar exported from Hawaii,” which had been the basis of the American Hawaiian Steamship Company’s business, and that “a large part of the cargo previously routed ‘all rail’ from the mills to the seaboard would be diverted to the water carrier.”

Mr. Bates believes that all this is but a forerunner of that “which will move after the completion of the canal.” He concludes with a frank admission that “we have tried, first, to lay a foundation for a business for ourselves to be brought about by the Panama Canal, and, secondly, that we have tried to do something toward the development of our State and it’s wonderful resources in the trade between the cities of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and the Gulf and Atlantic ports.”

He is a type of the young business man in whom intelligence and energy, plus foresight and broadness of view, have made a sum of remarkable success. It is largely through these qualities that his company, though still in its infancy, has developed a trade surpassing his expectations.

He is a member of the Bohemian Club, University Club, Merchants’ Exchange, San Francisco Golf, Tivoli Club of Panama and California State Automobile Association.

Transcribed by Betty Vickroy.

Source: Press Reference Library, Western Edition Notables of the West, Vol. I, Page 274, International News Service, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Atlanta. 1913.

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