John Fontenay
John Fontenay (* around 1770 presumably in Pennsylvania or Massachusetts ; † March 7, 1835 in Hamburg ) was a shipbroker , shipowner and businessman who lived and worked mainly in Hamburg from around 1800. He bought numerous pieces of land and real estate there. Fontenay is remembered today in Hamburg by three street names in the area known as "Fontenay" on the south-western bank of the Outer Alster .
Life
Childhood and youth
Little is known about the first years of his life until his arrival in Hamburg; Place and date of birth are unclear. Fontenay, who never celebrated a birthday himself, stated that he was born in Philadelphia around the turn of the year 1769/70 . Researchers suspect that his mother, Jane Fontenay , gave birth to him as a 13-year-old emigrant several months after arriving in America on Swan Island . She was probably impregnated by an unknown person on the schooner "Molly" during the crossing from Jersey Channel Island to Boston .
He probably spent the first years of his life on Swan Island in the household of Philip Dumaresq , a noble merchant who employed Fontenay's mother as the family's nanny. At the age of about seven, Fontenay moved into the household of Samuel Garrigues and Mary Ralph in Philadelphia , where he likely stayed until adulthood. When Fontenay relocated to Hamburg is not exactly known. In 1801 his name was first mentioned in the Hamburg address book; presumably he had stayed in the Hanseatic city before. On May 20th of the same year he was elected ship broker; seven days later he acquired the minor Hamburg citizenship . He needed this to marry the wealthy widow Anna Catharina Kirsten , whom he married on January 24, 1802. Kirsten brought four underage children into the marriage, which Fontenay looked after until the end of his life. At the time of marriage he gave Mary Ralph from Philadelphia as the biological mother and stated that he had been living in Hamburg since 1797.
Life in Hamburg
After Fontenay began his professional activities in Hamburg in 1801 , the economic situation of his family deteriorated due to the blockade of the Elbe and the French occupation of Hamburg . On April 11, 1810, he auctioned all of the Fontenays' movable property and three weeks later left the Hanseatic city with his family to travel to England via Glückstadt and Cuxhaven , where they stayed for thirteen months. In June 1811, the family took the parliamentary ship “Le Brillant” to Morlaix in France , then after a four-week stay in Paris traveled on to Clermont-Ferrand , where they lived for two years. While Fontenay had pretended to be a Hamburg merchant in London, he appeared in France as an American citizen. The reasons for choosing the French Massif Central as a place of residence are not known. He lived there withdrawn and maintained relationships with a few local residents. Fontenay's business activities from this period are not recorded. After Napoleon's defeat , the family moved to Schleswig in June 1813 , then under Danish rule, and returned to Hamburg in May 1814, where Fontenay resumed his professional activity.
Act
Fontenay operated in Hamburg in trade and shipping and acquired several properties and residential buildings. He did not take part in the social or political life of the city.
Ship broker, owner and merchant
Fontenay probably received his training as a ship broker from Johann Wietjes , a Hamburg ship broker and notary who probably also supported Fontenay's election as a ship broker. After Fontenay was elected in May 1801, he handled over 100 ships that year, 133 in the following year, and a further 50 until the Elbe blockade in mid-1803. Due to the blockade, ships no longer called at the Hamburg port, but Tönning . Since Fontenay had few local contacts, he only handled eight clearances in the second half of 1803 and worked with correspondence brokers from 1804 onwards. This also included Thomas Goulton Hesleden , with whom the Hamburg resident cooperated from July 1, 1804. Hesleden, who lived or stayed in Tönning and did business in Denmark, took on the role of broker, while Fontenay worked as a merchant and shipowner, which he was not actually entitled to due to the brokerage oath. In addition, he and Hesleden operated the route between Hamburg and Kingston upon Hull in England with their own sailing ship from the end of 1804 .
As a result of the blockade on the Elbe, the ship brokerage business in the Port of Hamburg came to a virtual standstill. While Hesleden did business on the English Heligoland from 1809 , Fontenay took over the business activities of the company in Tönning and took care of the repair of his sailing ship in Glückstadt. In 1810 he decided to give up his professional activities, auction all private movables and leave Hamburg. After his return to the Hanseatic city, he continued working with Hesleden. They dispatched the first ship on June 8, 1814, and another 187 had been added by the end of the year. This was 22 percent of all large ships that left the port of Hamburg during this time. In 1820 businessmen handled every fourth English ship in port. From 1822 to 1827 Fontenay and Hesleden were registered as brokers in the Hamburg address book on Admiralitätsstrasse.
Real estate ownership
In the course of his life, Fontenay acquired an extensive portfolio of real estate and land in Hamburg, particularly in the area north of the Dammtor . On July 15, 1802, he bought a house at Admiralitätstrasse 221/212 (later 61/62), which he used as a place to live and work for life. In 1807 and 1808 he acquired several plots of land on Mittelweg with an area of approximately 5,000 square meters. Here he had his house and garden house built. Fontenay kept these properties during his travels abroad. During the French occupation, all properties and houses were devastated.
After his return to the Hanseatic city, Fontenay acquired a 50,000 square meter property on the south-western bank of the Outer Alster in 1816 . It was the First Botanical Garden in Hamburg founded by Johannes Flügge . In the following years he bought nine more properties in this area. When the will was drawn up, the area covered an area of 84,000 square meters. He also owned several houses in Hamburg that he had acquired over the course of his life.
Sailing ship "Frau Anna"
Between 1804 and 1810 Fontenay was the owner of his own sailing ship. He and his brother-in-law Hinrich Friedrich Ballheimer acquired the ship, which was built in 1800 and named after his wife's first name “Frau Anna” or “Fraw Anna”, with 194 gross tons and a draft of twelve feet . Since Fontenay was a broker and was therefore not allowed to act as a shipowner, he named Mr. Balemen , Balleman or Ballemann as the owner in Lloyd’s shipping register . Due to Hesleden's connections, the ship flying the Hamburg flag was allowed to leave the port of Hamburg despite the blockade on the Elbe. The ship, built around 1800, had a wreck three times by 1810. Fontenay sold "Frau Anna" during his stay in London in November 1810 to his English business partners Glee, Blades and Loft , presumably in order to finance his trips to England, France and Denmark and to be able to support the family.
Office flag
Fontenay and Hesleden used a pennant with seven red and six white stripes for faulty ships of the English shipping company Gee & Co. The pennant is now hoisted on Alsterufer 34 . Historical illustrations show the pennant with up to nine red and eight white stripes. The shipping company of Adolph Kirsten , which was co-founded by Fontenay's stepson, used a flag with five red and four white stripes.
Family grave
Fontenay died on March 7, 1835 in his house at Mittelweg 185 . His widow Anna Catharina bought a tomb for the Kirsten family on the burial ground of St. Michaeliskirche in front of the Dammtor. The crypt was just a few minutes' walk from the family seat outside the city walls. These burial places near the city were closed for burials in 1879. The Kirsten family then acquired graves in the Ohlsdorf cemetery for the duration of the cemetery (grid square Z 11). The bones of John Fontenay have only been lying here since 1924. The middle section of the original tomb and all of the family's remains were moved from the burial site of St. Michaeliskirche to Ohlsdorf. An engraving with the name Fontenays on a narrow marble slab on the Kirstens family grave reminds us of the famous Hamburg merchant of American origin.
estate
The will signed by Fontenay on October 25, 1831 provided for a family entailment. On March 28, 1938, the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court declared that it was not a Fideikommiss, but a family foundation. The estate is now administered by the John Fontenay's Testament Foundation.
In addition to his wife and their children, the will provided for an inheritance from Jane Bloomore . This was allegedly the child of a friend Fontenay's from America and, as a foster child, had probably been in the Fontenay household since 1822/23 when she was three years old. Fontenay said he had received the money from Jane's father and held it in trust for his daughter. After Fontenay's death, this statement led to legal disputes between Jane Bloomore and the Kirsten family. Suspicions of the tax authorities, according to which "our foster care was more closely connected to the deceased testator than the will states," contradicted one of Fontenay's step-sons.
All current beneficiaries of the foundation are descendants of Heinrich Friedrich Kirsten , Fontenay's oldest stepson.
Honors and Trivia
- An area on the southwestern Outer Alster in the Hamburg district of Rotherbaum is now known as "Fontenay".
- The streets Fontenay, Klein Fontenay and Fontenay-Allee bear the name of the shipowner.
- Both Fontenay's garden house and his house have been preserved and are now a listed building. You are at house numbers 183 and 185 on Hamburger Mittelweg.
- The Fontenay memorial , which has stood on Fontenay Street since 1926, not far from the war memorial, commemorates Fontenay .
- The purchase agreement between Fontenay and Blaydes, Loft and Gee for the sailing ship Frau Anna has been preserved and is kept in the treasury of the Hamburg State Archives. It is a 70 by 85 centimeter piece of paper that was written in old English and written on parchment paper. Because of the jagged shape at the top, it is called "indenture".
- Fontenay planted a plane tree at his house at Mittelweg 185 , from which he allegedly raised a descendant for each of his children and planted them behind his house. After a daughter died in 1833, he had one of the four trees felled. The other trees have been preserved and are now under nature protection. It has not been proven whether these three trees actually descended from the plane tree, whose planting year experts date to 1807.
- In 1824 Fontenay had five houses built on Mittelweg, which were popularly known as "tea caddies" due to their design. Three of the houses were destroyed shortly before the end of World War II in 1945, the other buildings were demolished in 1951.
- Today the “Friends of Swan Island” present one of the rooms in the former home of Rebecca Dumaresq and Silvester Gardiner as Fontenay's birth room.
- Since 2014, the Hamburg investor Klaus-Michael Kühne has had the hotel " The Fontenay " built in the Fontenay area on the site of the former Interconti Hotel . Completion should be in 2016 and was then postponed to spring 2018. According to Kühne, it should be “the best hotel in Germany”.
literature
- Mathias Eberenz, Dieter Gartmann, Harald A. Kirsten: John Fontenay - Hamburg ship broker and businessman - founder of the John Fontenay's Testament Foundation . Ed .: Foundation "John Fontenay's Testament". 1st edition. Medien-Verlag Schubert, Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-937843-24-7 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Franklin Kopitzsch , Daniel Tilgner (Ed.): Hamburg Lexikon. 4th, updated and expanded special edition. Ellert & Richter, Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-8319-0373-3 , p. 227.
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad ae Mathias Eberenz, Dieter Gartmann, Harald A. Kirsten: John Fontenay - Hamburger Schiffsmakler und Kaufmann - Founder of the John Fontenay's Testament Foundation . Ed .: Foundation "John Fontenay's Testament". 1st edition. Medien-Verlag Schubert, Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-937843-24-7 .
- ↑ Temporarily uninhabited island in Perkins , an Unorganized Territory in Sagadahoc County , Maine . The island is located in Merrymeeting Bay , the inland estuary of the Kennebec River . See en: Perkins Township, Maine
- ↑ quoted from: Mathias Eberenz, Dieter Gartmann, Harald A. Kirsten: John Fontenay - Hamburg ship broker and businessman - founder of the John Fontenay's Testament Foundation . Ed .: Foundation "John Fontenay's Testament". 1st edition. Medien-Verlag Schubert, Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-937843-24-7 , p. 84 and 130 f .
- ↑ Kühne and Scholz lay the foundation stone for hotel “The Fontenay” . In: Hamburger Abendblatt , August 14, 2014; Retrieved December 4, 2014
- ↑ thefontenay.de Announcement of the opening: Fall 2017 , accessed on May 12, 2017
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Fontenay, John |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Ship broker, owner and merchant |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1769 or 1770 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | unsure: Pennsylvania or Massachusetts |
| DATE OF DEATH | March 7, 1835 |
| Place of death | Hamburg |