He had a flair for politics, and in 1845 was appointed Vice Consul to Mexico by Consul Thomas Oliver Larkin, serving under the jurisdiction of Commodore Stockton, then military governor of California. In this capacity Leidesdorff gave aid to Fremont and the Americans raising the Bear flag in the historic rebellion at Sonoma in 1846. His official report of this incident to Consul Larkin, not published until 1939, remains an important document of the period.

A bachelor to the end of his days, Leidesdorff nevertheless established himself in a commodious home on the corner of California and Montgomery Streets, a step from the present high-storied Russ Building, and from this vantage point won international fame as one of the city’s most genial hosts. Whenever government officials, American or Mexican, came to town, Leidesdorff’s home, the largest and most impressive in the area, was always chosen as the scene for lavish state entertainment. He had the urbanity of a seasoned diplomat, politician, and man of affairs. His cuisine offered the finest foods and wines and he could boast the only flower garden in all Yerba Buena.

On the local level, he held civic positions of honor and trust. He was a member of the town’s first council; he was town treasurer, and one of the three members of the first school board which supervised the building of the first public school erected for children in the community.

In a lighter vein, he found occasion in the field of sports, to indulge the lively spirit of speculation and daring which he brought with him into California. Among his last ventures, in 1847, was the staging of the state’s first horse race, on a “meadow” near Mission Dolores, especially improvised for this unprecedented event.

Leidesdorff died of brain fever in 1848 at the early age of thirty-eight. In his death he was accorded the highest recognition a bereaved community could tender a beloved and honored citizen. Flags hung at half-mast from all military barracks and vessels in the port. Minute guns were fired as the funeral procession made its way through the winding streets to Mission Dolores, where with imposing ceremonies his body was laid to rest.

But the Leidesdorff story did not end here. For years afterward, the history of the man was linked with the history of his estate. At the time of his death, his property was encumbered with debts amounting to some $50,000, but the discovery of gold in that same year, later increased its value to nearly a million dollars.

Joseph Libby Folsom, captain in the U. S. Army and at one time collector of the port, set himself the task of finding the Leidesdorff heirs and securing from them the right and title to their kinsman’s California estate. He journeyed all the way to the Virgin Islands in search of Anna Marie Spark, the mother, who still lived in the islands with her other children. Folsom paid her the sum of $75,000, which gave him absolute title to the whole of the Leidesdorff property. The various business transactions that followed in the ultimate sale and disposition of this property became a cause celebre straight through to the end of the century.

But Folsom himself lived only a short time to enjoy the wealth obtained from the Leidesdorff estate. He died at Mission San Jose, in July, 1855, at the same age as Leidesdorff, at the time of his death. His memorial was the town of Folsom, which stood on the site of “Rio De Los Americanos” ranch, and the old Montgomery Block in San Francisco, built by Halleck in 1863, on a very small portion of the property owned by Leidesdorff, and later by Folsom.

There is magic in the names of the streets in San Francisco. “Larkin,” “Stockton,” “Sutter,” “Leidesdorff,” “Folsom.” Streets, which as “men in the flesh” were once closely associated. Some of them run parallel or across each other, as the blending of a dream. They serve to remind the city of those men who gave it its beginning. Robert Ernest Cowan connects two of them in a brilliant comparison of Leidesdorff and Folsom, published in the Quarterly of the California: Historical Society, June, 1928:

Both men were ambitious, venturesome, clear in vision, wide in mental perspective, firm in their conviction, and capable in their many undertakings. Both had an unbounded faith in the future of the beloved city, wherein they had lived and toiled and died.”

Courtesy of the San Francisco African American Historical Society.