Justus Ruperti (entrepreneur)

Justus Ruperti with family 1835

Family grave in Jacobipark

Justus Carl Wilhelm Ruperti (born October 29, 1791 in Stade ; † November 3, 1861 in Hamburg ) was a German businessman and investor .

Act as an entrepreneur

Justus Ruperti's ancestors came from Lower Saxony and worked as civil servants, pastors and merchants. He himself was a son of the theologian Georg Alexander Ruperti and his wife Elisabeth Maria Louise, née Wickhardt (1764-1836). He attended the Athenaeum in his native Stade and began commercial training in 1805 at the Hamburg company Krummes & Knoop . In 1810 he moved to London to join the Lindley & Zimmermann company , in which his brother-in-law Friedrich Christian Zimmermann held shares. Ruperti initially worked here as a commissioner, then as an associé. He was given £ 70 a year and lunch with his brother-in-law's family.

Shortly before the bankruptcy of the Lindley & Zimmermann company , Ruperti joined the German company Friedrich Huth & Co. in 1819 , which was considered the most important German company in London at the time. For these companies from England he often traveled through Europe. In 1822 he went to Mexico from London as an agent for Green & Hartley . There he built up a new company on behalf of the company as a business partner and worked to promote German colonization and, in the meantime, to open up mines. In 1827 he briefly visited London and Hamburg and then went back to Mexico and sold his company shares. In 1829 he traveled again to Hamburg via New York , Le Havre and London. He brought savings of around 100,000 Banco marks with him. In addition, there were 200,000 Marks in Banco, which he had inherited from his mother. With this capital he opened his own trading agency.

At the beginning of 1836 Ruperti joined the trading company HJ Merck & Co. of his father-in-law Heinrich Johann Merck as a co-owner . In 1840 Ernst Merck and Theodor Merck (1816–1889) were added as sons of Heinrich Johann Merck. Together they led it to one of the largest trading companies of its time, which survived the economic crisis of 1857 only with city help.

Commitment to railway construction

In 1839 Justus Ruperti, Karl Sieveking and August Abendroth formed a "Provisional Committee" with the aim of creating a rail link from Hamburg to Bergedorf . As the Hamburg-Bergedorfer Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft they sold 5,000 shares at 300 Mark Banco each for the necessary investments. As an elected member, Ruperti received a seat in the five-person board of directors. The Hamburg Senate made it possible for them to purchase land for the station building and the route through an initial expropriation law . After acquiring the land and starting construction work, the Hamburg-Bergedorfer Railway was created .

Then Ruperti took part in a leading position in a committee that wanted to extend the railway line to Berlin . In doing so, they reached a state treaty between the six territories involved, ratified on February 18, 1842. A joint-stock company then built the Berlin – Hamburg line .

Property speculation

From 1838, Ruperti and August Abendroth bought larger areas on Hammerbrook . With this he hoped to benefit from a foreseeable demand for land for companies and apartments. They cooperated with Heinrich Christian Meyer , the house broker Friedrich Georg Heinrich Hornbostel and the bleacher Johann Friedrich Schultz, who had a seat on Hammerbrook. On September 14, 1840, they joined forces to form the “Interest of Hammerbrook and Billwärder Ausschlag Landunternehmung”, in which Ruperti held 22 percent with 300,000 Mark Banco. After acquiring the lands, they wanted to drain them, make them passable and develop them. They commissioned William Lindley to design a lock and a drainage system , which were completed by 1847. Nevertheless, there were floods in 1849/50 and 1854/55. The interest could only sell the land after the end of the Hamburg gate lock in 1860/61. It is not sufficiently documented whether the entrepreneurs achieved speculative profits.

Together with Heinrich Christian Meyer, Ruperti acquired additional areas on Grasbrook . These were plots of land previously used as bleaching meadows on the so-called “wall rider framework”. In 1840 they owned 37 pieces of land totaling 74,322 square meters for which they had paid about 400,000 marks in banco. They wanted to build commercial facilities and apartments here, but encountered resistance. Your conflict with the Hamburg council went back to unclear property relations that had existed since the Middle Ages. In addition, the areas were considered the only sensible area to expand the Port of Hamburg . Ruperti and Meyer did not stick to their development plans, but instead offered the city to swap the land they had acquired for nearby plots of comparable size. There followed several years of discussion and negotiations with the city of Hamburg, which did not want to make a decision. The conflict only ended after Meyer's death in 1854. Ruperti and Meyer's heirs received a significantly smaller area of ​​7897 square meters and 387,660 marks in cash in exchange for the land they had acquired, with which they should not have made any profit.

Volunteering

Ruperti had been a member of the Commerzdeputation since December 18, 1841 and took over the office of President from 1847 to 1856. In this position he edited the magazine “Der Freihandel” and spoke out emphatically in favor of free trade. He spoke for the Commerzdeputation in December 1847 at a meeting of the Honorable Merchant . He unsuccessfully proposed that Jews who had Hamburg citizenship should be granted membership. After the March Revolution , he and 26 other citizens submitted an application to the Hamburg Council. In it they demanded that the Hamburg citizenship should elect a constituent body that should draft a more contemporary constitution.

1830 Rupert took over the office of the provisor of the guest and hospital and served from 1836 as its year manager.

family

Justus Carl Wilhelm Ruperti , Marie Paulina Ruperti b. Merck 1808-1861 , Ohlsdorf Cemetery

On November 12, 1829 Ruperti married the much younger Maria Pauline Merck (1808–1861), a daughter of Senator Heinrich Johann Merck. Both had eight children. The couple initially lived in an apartment in the Große Bleichen . With their first offspring, they moved into a house on what is now Ballindamm , which they lost during the Hamburg fire .

Ruperti had owned a garden in Hamm since 1839 , which he had received from Heinrich Johann Merck. A house that had been demolished during the French era in Hamburg stood there. Ruperti had a country house designed by Eduard Stammann built there in 1840 , where the family presumably lived. In 1846 the family moved into a newly built town house at Ferdinandstrasse 64.

Since 1856 the manor Grubno in the district of Kulm belonged to the other lands of Ruperti . His son and farmer Karl (1835–1909) lived there.

Rupertistraße in Nienstedten has been a reminder of the former property of the Ruperti family since 1949 .

Justus Ruperti and his wife Marie Pauline are commemorated on the collective grave slab of the Merck family in the Althamburg Memorial Cemetery, Ohlsdorf Cemetery .

literature

• Claus Gossler: Ruperti, Justus . In: Franklin Kopitzsch, Dirk Brietzke (Hrsg.): Hamburgische Biographie . tape 6 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2012, ISBN 978-3-8353-1025-4 , p. 277-280 .
• Percy Ernst Schramm : Hamburg, Germany and the world: Achievement and limits of the Hanseatic bourgeoisie in the time between Napoleon I and Bismarck; a chapter of German history . Munich: Univ.-Verl. Callwey, 1943

Web links

Commons : Justus Carl Wilhelm Ruperti  - Collection of images, videos and audio files