All About Coffee

All About Coffee Part2

with him as to the wisdom of promoting a coffee corner, and protested

that it was against public policy; but Arnold's personal integrity was

never questioned, and his mercantile ability and honorable business

dealings won for him an affectionate regard that continued after his

fortune had been swept away.

After the collapse of the coffee corner, Mr. Arnold resumed business

with his son, F.B. Arnold. He died in New York, December 10, 1894, in

his eighty-second year. The son died in Rome in 1906. The business which

the father founded, however, continues today as Arnold, Dorr & Co., one

of the most honored and respected names in Front Street.

_Hermann Sielcken, the Last Coffee King_

If B.G. Arnold was first coffee king, Hermann Sielcken was last, for it

is unlikely that ever again, in the United States, will it be possible

for one man to achieve so absolute a dictatorship of the green coffee

business.

There never was a coffee romance like that of Hermann Sielcken's. Coming

to America a poor boy in 1869, forty-five years later, he left it many

times a millionaire. For a time, he ruled the coffee markets of the

world with a kind of autocracy such as the trade had never seen before

and probably will not see again. And when, just before the outbreak of

the World War, he returned to Germany for the annual visit to his

Baden-Baden estate, from which he was destined never again to sally

forth to deeds of financial prowess, his subsequent involuntary

retirement found him a huge commercial success, where B.G. Arnold was a

colossal failure. It was the World War and a lingering illness that, at

the end, stopped Hermann Sielcken. But, though he had to admit himself

bested by the fortunes of war, he was still undefeated in the world of

commerce. He died in his native Germany in 1917, the most commanding,

and the most cordially disliked, figure ever produced by the coffee

trade.

Hermann Sielcken was born in Hamburg in 1847, and so was seventy years

old when he died at Baden-Baden, October 8, 1917. He was the son of a

small baker in Hamburg; and before he was twenty-one, he went to Costa

Rica to work for a German firm there. He did not like Costa Rica, and

within a year he went to San Francisco, where, with a knowledge of

English already acquired, he got a job as a shipping clerk. This was in

1869. A wool concern engaged him as buyer, and for about six years he

covered the territory between the Rockies and the Pacific, buying wool.

On one of these trips he was in a stage-coach wreck in Oregon and nearly

lost his life. He received injuries affecting his back from which he