Isaac Stone
Isaac Stone, #WS 14/1970
Values Codes I – E – L – P
Isaac Stone was born in 1825.
He arrived in America in early 1850’s, probably from Bratislava, now the capital of Slovakia.
San Francisco
Isaac Stone married the Bavarian-born Hannah Koshland in 1854.
They lived in Sacramento until the disastrous floods of winter 1861-1862, at which time they moved to San Francisco.
Stone established a dairy in the early 1860’s. The San Francisco Directory listed it as a “milk dairy,” “milk ranch,” or simply as a “dairy.”
The dairy of Isaac Stone operated for years with San Francisco Milk Permit No. 1.
Rabbi Max Lilienthal, a famed visitor to the dairy from Cincinnati in 1879, wrote that 175 cows were housed in a beautifully clean barn, and that four Swiss men were employed to milk and care for the cows and care for them.
At the time of Lilienthal’s visit, Isaac Stone’s sons were the principal milk deliverymen. Lilienthal also observed that the Stone family “is an honor to themselves and the Jewish community of San Francisco.”
The Stone Dairy off of San Bruno Road was described as being “about two miles from the city.”
The milk delivery equipment was contained in a second barn, which housed eighteen horses, the delivery wagons, hay, etc.
A blacksmith shop and a small gasworks, which produced gas for lighting, were a part of the plant.
Rabbi Lilienthal pointed out that Isaac Stone had amassed “a nice little fortune” from his dairy business by means of hard work and industriousness.
Family
Hannah Koshland Stone, #WS17/2419
One of the Isaac Stone sons, Abraham Lincoln Stone, born in 1865, became a top dairy expert in the West. He married Helen Eppinger in 1894. He owned a large ranch on the Bethel tract in the San Joaquin Delta, where members of the family used to spend their vacations.
Fanny Stone, one of Hannah and Isaac’s daughters, was born in 1863, and married Bernard Sinsheimer in 1881. For a time, she and her husband lived in San Luis Obispo, where he was in business. They moved to San Francisco in the 1890’s where Fanny became a leading social figure of the city.
Marcus Stone, the second of the Isaac Stone children, born in 1860, worked for a time as a bookkeeper for his uncle, the wool commission merchant Simon Koshland. For some years Marcus also operated the Baldwin Hotel, located at Market and Powell.
Leon Daniel Stone, the youngest of the family, was born in 1871. He operated his own meat business in the 1890’s, then became the owner of the Golden Pheasant Restaurant at 32 Geary after the 1906 Earthquake-Fire. He married Sophie Eppinger, sister of Helen Eppinger Stone, in 1895. Sophie and Helen’s father, Herman Eppinger, had been a merchant in Dixon, California before retiring and moving to San Francisco.
Source
- Norton B. Stern, “Isaac Stone,” Western States Jewish History 41/2.
