The Flickr Williamkohl Image Generatr

Bronze statue of a shaggy Italian guard dog located by the rose garden in Central Park, San Mateo, California. Dogs aren’t usually welcomed unleashed in city parks, but San Mateo’s Central Park makes an exception for one special canine. If you enter the park at the south entrance, you will be greeted by this handsome fellow, steadfast and quiet, so mellow that children can climb onto his back, so venerable he is older than the park itself. His is a heart of gold in a body of bronze.

Captain William H. Kohl (1820-1893) of Alaska fur trade fame bought what is now Central Park from Margaret Austin in 1880. He placed two big Italian dogs to guard the entrance to his large home. The land was purchased by the people of San Mateo in 1922...a bronze statue of one of his two dogs remains.

The Alaska Commercial Company building, built in 1908 and demolished in 1975 had not only walruses but also icicles and sea serpents, representing the environment of the far north from which they derived the corporate wealth.

San Francisco
May 2014

The Alaska Commercial Company and its successor company Northern Commercial Company was involved in fur trading and other businesses in Alaska. Gustave Niebaum, Lewis Gerstle, Louis Sloss, William Kohl were all San Francisco businessmen involved with the enterprise, which bought out the old Russian Alaska company in 1868. The Alaska Commercial Company was formed on January 1, 1868, with Louis Sloss as president. The ACC became the fount of the Sloss-Gerstle dynastic fortunes, and the de facto government of Alaska. by 1889, when its lease on Alaska's Pribiloff islands ran out, the company had harvested a reported 1,850,000 seal skins, for which it had paid the U.S. government nearly $9.5 million. Its stockholders had harvested a reported $18 million in profits over the same period.

read more about the company, the families and their causing the near-extinction of the seals here: foundsf.org/index.php?title=ALASKA_COMMERCIAL_CORPORATION

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