FRANK LAMPSON BROWN

San Francisco County

Biographies

FRANK LAMPSON BROWN

BROWN, FRANK LAMPSON, Capitalist, San Francisco, California, was born at Kenosha, Wisconsin, March 4, 1860, the son of Charles Curtis Brown and Katherine Jane Brown. He married Harriet Walker at Oakland, California, January 1, 1894, and of their union there have been born three children, Katherine (now Mrs. Thornton White), Laurence Walker and Harriet Walker Brown.

He began at an early age to fight the battles of life and has been at it ever since, and has been with a constantly enlarging field of operations, as well as a considerable number of victories to his credit. Leaving the St. James Parish School, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, when he was just twelve years of age, he found employment in the general offices of the North Western Telephone Company, at Kenosha. The following year he shifted the scene of his youthful activities to the office of the North Western Woven Wire Mattress Company, and remained with this corporation for ten years, getting his commercial experience and taking his course in which he has called the “University of Hard Knocks.”

With a degree, of useful knowledge at least, of what the struggle for success means, he moved in 1883 to Portland, Oregon, where he became Secretary of the Staver, Walker Company, and when the firm was succeeded by Mitchell, Lewis and Staver, retained his secretaryship in the new company. He was also made secretary of the Portland Traction Company---to the considerable increase of his income and of his opportunities.

In 1893 Mr. Brown moved to San Francisco to act as Pacific Coast agent of the Washburn & Moen Manufacturing Company of Worcester, Mass. This was succeeded by the American Steel and Wire Company, with which he remained as Pacific Coast manager until 1900. He then became general sales agent for the Shelby Steel Tube Company with headquarters at Cleveland, Ohio. He had not been in Oakland long, however, before his ideas began to expand, possibly under the influence of the climate and the contagion of progress; and in 1903 he organized the Pacific Steel and Wire Company for which he became the general manager. With this fresh stimulus to larger endeavors he soon formed the Telephone Electric Equipment Company; and later seeing the great promise of the oil fields, and of the development of power in California he organized the Palmer Oil Company, the Great Western Power Company and many other large corporations.

Mr. Brown has been very active in development and construction work that will benefit not only the individuals most directly concerned, but also the state at large. And this is especially true of his connections with the preparations for the Panama-Pacific Exposition. From the start he has been a member of the executive and exploitation committees, so ardent and busy in the cause that his own important private affairs have suffered somewhat. Characteristically he has devoted his energies to the work, and regards whatever success he may attain therein as a personal as well as a civic duty and triumph. And in the meantime he manages to prove his good citizenship by his activity on the executive committee of the California Development Board, and on the council of the Unitarian Club of San Francisco.

Mr. Brown’s club life is no exception in the variety of his interests. He is a popular member of the Bohemian, the Cosmos, the Commercial, the Unitarian, Union League and Press Clubs of San Francisco, and of the Claremont Country Club of Oakland, the Arlington of Portland, Oregon; the Lawyers of New York, as well as of the Society of Colonial Wars and Sons of the American Revolution.

Though a San Franciscan in spirit, he has resided in Oakland since 1893.

Transcribed 11-18-06 Marilyn R. Pankey.

Source: Press Reference Library, Western Edition Notables of the West, Vol. I, Page 130, International News Service, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Atlanta. 1913.

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