DAVID PERRY DOAK

San Francisco County

Biographies

DAVID PERRY DOAK

DOAK, DAVID PERRY, Capitalist, San Francisco, California, was born in the town of Cameron, Missouri, January 27, 1866, the son of Thomas Doak and Sarah (Coffing) Doak.

Mr. Doak received his early education in the public schools of his native town and subsequently took a course at the Macon City College of Macon, Missouri. Upon completion of this part of his studies he immediately embarked on his commercial career and from that day down to date has been continually engaged. His career, begun with banking, has coursed through railroad construction and the surveying of terminals to the organization of modern steel plants, and he is now president of the Pacific Coast Steel Company. His has been an evolution natural, if somewhat metallic, for a man whose constitution has absorbed something like the powerful material in which he has worked and whose large ideas have been backed by the ability to execute them.

Mr. Doak first entered business life in a bank at Kendall, Kansas. In this he continued from 1886 to 1889, and then, after advancing through various stages in that field, changed to railroad construction, in which he was busy for the next four years.

In 1893 he became President and General Manager of the Missouri Smelting Co. at St. Louis, but in 1899 left this office to engage in the surveying of terminals and various lines for certain transcontinental roads that desired to extend their operations to the Pacific Coast. He was active in this work until 1903, when he was made President, in full charge of the construction of the Panama-American R. R. of Mexico. By the completion of this he connected the Mexican lines with the railroads of Guatemala, and subsequently sold to the Mexican Government.

During these years of varied experience in somewhat similar fields his ideas of development and construction work were expanding and led him to shift his operations to what he deemed the most promising ground for them. He had come to California from St. Louis in 1899, and was not slow to sense the great possibilities to be realized by imagination and energy. So from 1910 to 1911 we find him engaged in constructing the first modern steel plant on the Pacific Coast. This has since been consolidated with the Seattle Company and the Portland Rolling Mills, under the name of the Pacific Coast Steel Co. The business has expanded to huge proportions, and has added much to the importance of this section of the country as an industrial Promised Land.

Of recent years Mr. Doak has devoted much of his time to the development of his water rights on the McCloud River. He owns ten thousand acres of land in Shasta County, adjacent to this river, and therein has a watershed capable of supplying 80,000 inches, or 500,000,000 gallons of water per day. This he naturally regards as a formidable rival of any company in the field, and is determined to demonstrate its practicability in this respect.

It is planned to bring this water through a concrete aqueduct down the Sacramento Valley, and furnish the towns and cities along its course, with a view to ultimately supplying San Francisco and other bay cities. Having generally succeeded in materializing his large views of things, Mr. Doak is confident that this last will not prove an exception in his progressive march toward the goal he has sighted.

While he has many big interests he concentrates chiefly on his water rights, the Pacific Coast Steel Co., The Doak Sheet Steel Co. and the Standard Corrugated Pipe Co., of all which he is president. He is a member of the Pacific Union Club of San Francisco and the ranking clubs of St. Louis, Mo., but devotes most of his time to business.

Transcribed by Betty Vickroy.

Source: Press Reference Library, Western Edition Notables of the West, Vol. I, Page 304, International News Service, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Atlanta. 1913.

California Biography Project

San Francisco County

California Statewide

Golden Nugget Library