Theodor Cordua

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Theodor Cordua (1835)

Theodor Cordua , also Theodore Cordua , completely Christoph August Theodor Cordua (born October 23, 1796 in Wardow , † October 8, 1857 in Güstrow ) was a German merchant and pioneer in California .

Life

Theodor Cordua was a son of Johann Friedrich Cordua, who acquired the Raden ( Lalendorf ) estate in 1802 , and his wife Dorothea Eva Alexandrine, née. Mountain. The theologian and member of the Mecklenburg Assembly of Representatives in 1848/49 Hermann Cordua was his younger (half) brother. He was raised by private tutors. As a young man he left his homeland; he lived in Java for a few years and traveled the coast of America. In Surinam (Dutch Guiana) he founded a trading company in Paramaribo with branches in Lübeck and Amsterdam . On his plantation Hermitage he put the starch product arrowroot flour ( arrowroot ) ago for export to Europe. After losing business and assets in 1840, he traveled to Chile and Peru in search of new trading areas . For some time he also lived in Hawaii .

Map of the Cordua grant between Yuba River and Feather River (1874); North is right

Eventually he came to California . In payment for goods brought from Hawaii, Johann August Sutter gave him land north of Sacramento in what is now Yuba County as lease land. Cordua was the first European to settle in this part of California. In 1843 he built a farmhouse and trading post . He named the place New Mecklenburg (now Marysville ). In 1844 he was the northern from its leased land by the Mexican government Rancho Honcut between the Feather River and the Sierra Nevada acquire a large land area of seven leagues square, 31,080 acres (125.8 square kilometers ). Here he successfully ran extensive cattle and grain cultivation.

In 1848, at the beginning of the California gold rush , which radically changed the landscape and the social fabric, he had to give up agriculture due to a lack of labor. He sold part of the ranch to his co-worker Charles Julian Covillaud and his wife Mary Murphy, a survivor of the Donner Party , after which the place was named. In 1849 he sold the rest to Covillaud's brother-in-law Michael C. Nye and William M. Foster. Cordua moved to San Francisco and lost most of the proceeds to fires, floods, and real estate investments in the gold rush town of Suttersville, Sacramento County .

In 1852 he left California and moved to Hawaii. In 1856 he returned to Mecklenburg.

Through his daughter Marie Elisabeth (* 1823 in Paramaribo ; † 1896 in Lübeck), one of the six children he had with the Creole and released slave Katharine Höft in Surinam, he was the grandfather of Lübeck's mayor Johann Martin Andreas Neumann .

Gifts

Cordua sent descriptions of fauna and flora as well as minerals and unusual animal material from his travels to the University of Rostock for their zoological collection . The Museum für Naturkunde (Berlin) also keeps specimens of insects from Suriname that Cordua had collected and sent in.

memory

Theodor Cordua is remembered by the Cordua Elementary School in Marysville, the Cordua Irrigation District north of Marysville and the Cordua Canal between Mello and Iowa City in Yuba County and the historic place name Cordua Bar on the Yuba River .

Works

  • Erwin G. Gudde (Ed.): The Memoirs of Theodor Cordua: The Pioneer of New Mecklenburg in the Sacramento Valley. In: California Historical Society Quarterly 12 (1933), pp. 279-311 doi : 10.2307 / 25178224 ( full text ; PDF; 352 kB).
  • Ursula Feldkamp: From Mecklenburg to Overseas. Notes from the life of a merchant and shipowner 1796–1857. Ernst Kabel Verlag, Hamburg 1996, ISBN 3-8225-0384-3 ; 2nd edition 2000 ISBN 978-3-8225-0384-3

literature

  • Grete Grewolls: Who was who in Mecklenburg and Western Pomerania. The dictionary of persons . Hinstorff Verlag, Rostock 2011, ISBN 978-3-356-01301-6 , p. 1862 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ So Grewolls; according to the death register of the Dreveskirchen village church on November 8, 1857 in Dreveskirchen, accessed via ancestry.com.
  2. ↑ Georg Friedrich Most: Detailed encyclopedia of the entire state medical science. For lawmakers, legal scholars, police officers, military doctors, forensic doctors, surgeons, pharmacists and veterinarians. Supplement-Band, Leipzig: Brockhaus 1840, p. 39
  3. ^ Albert L. Hurtado: John Sutter: A Life on the North American Frontier. University of Oklahoma Press, 2006, ISBN 9780806137728 , pp. 119f.
  4. ^ David L. Durham: California's Geographic Names: A Gazetteer of Historic and Modern Names of the State. Word Dancer Press, Clovis, Calif. 1998, ISBN 1-884995-14-4 , p. 520.
  5. ↑ Egmond Codfried: Aantekeningen op de Surinamse families Codfried, Heuft, Hóft, Hoeufft, Cordua, Neumann, Mosanto, Kerster en de Faria , Academia.edu, accessed on February 15, 2020.

Web links

Commons : Theodor Cordua  - collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Cordua, Theodore
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Cordua, Theodore; Cordua, Christoph August Theodor (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German merchant, pioneer in California and patron
DATE OF BIRTH October 23, 1796
PLACE OF BIRTH Wardow
DATE OF DEATH October 8, 1857
Place of death Guestrow