Jacob Cooper Lane, 1851-1901
Adoptive maternal great-grandfather
Jacob Cooper Lane may be the most interesting character in my family. He married the daughter of a famous Mormon hymnist and publisher. He adopted my maternal grandmother Edithe Green (later Edithe Alois Beutler), when she was seven months old after her mother died. His brother founded what would later become the Stanford University School of Medicine. He completed two directories of the Kingdom of Hawaii in the late 1880s and 1890s. He was a close friend of the writer, Jack London, who read a poem in his honor at his funeral. I wrote about him in detail in a chapter of my 2018 book, Unsung But Not Forgotten; Family Personalities With Surnames Bassett, Beutler, Bogdon, Charles, Green, Harned, Lane, Morgan, Phelps, Phipps.
Jacob was born on November 21, 1851, in Greens Fork, Clay Township, Wayne County, Indiana. His parents were Ira D. Lane and the former Hannah Cooper, both from Illinois. He was the youngest of nine children. The first was a girl, born in 1826.
Two members of his family would eventually transform medical practice in the San Francisco Bay Area. His mother’s brother, Elias Samuel Cooper (1819-1893), and Jacob’s brother, Levi Cooper Lane (1828-1902), both became practicing physicians/surgeons in San Francisco. In 1859, they collaborated on opening the first medical school in the western United States. The school was originally called the Medical Department of the University of the Pacific. It soon expanded to become Toland Medical College, then Cooper Medical College, adding on Lane Hospital. The medical complex was taken over by Stanford University’s Department of Medicine in 1908.
Jacob met Nellie C. Lane in Salt Lake City and married her there on July 31, 1871, when he was nineteen and Nellie was eighteen. Nellie’s father was William Wines Phelps, a colleague of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter-Day Saints Church (Mormon). Nellie was the daughter of her father’s fifth wife – polygamy used to be a be a common practice in the Mormon Church.
Jacob and Nellie in 1871
Jacob and Nellie moved to San Francisco in the mid-1870s when they were in their early twenties. They were pioneers of early California. Jacob worked in different jobs. Census and voting records list him as apothecary, policeman, fruit farmer, solicitor, and salesman. However, it was his activities in the areas of real estate and book publishing that are the most significant.
Early on, Jacob and Nellie saw the wisdom of buying land in the San Francisco Bay Area and nearby counties, using their own money, with help from Jacob’s parents and Nellie’s mother. Jacob started out as a fruit farmer, which of course required him to buy land. He later dealt in real estate. They became extremely successful, particularly in Alameda and Mendocino Counties. They moved to Oakland in 1886.
In 1888, Jacob Lane began working for McKenney Directory Company of San Francisco. There was a market for directories before telephone directories supplanted them. A directory is an alphabetical listing of individuals, organizations, and businesses in a particular locality, giving such details as full names, sometimes spouses, occupations, and addresses. Most directories were for cities. His major assignments were to compile directories for the city of Sacramento and for the Kingdom of Hawaii. Jacob compiled his first directory for the city of Sacramento for 1888-1889 and then moved on to one for the Kingdom of Hawaii. Gathering the information for the directories required him to be away from home for long periods. Sacramento was only 70 miles from Oakland and an easy jaunt by train. However, getting to Hawaii required a seven-day voyage by steamship across 2400 miles of ocean and a many-month stay to collect the data from the eight islands in the Kingdom. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, Jacob worked on three annual directories for Sacramento and two directories for the Kingdom of Hawaii.
In 1888, Hawaii was not yet a state of the United States, but a separate country, the Kingdom of Hawaii. In 1888, King Kalakaua (1836-1891) was its sovereign. It was the custom for the McKenney Company to dedicate their Hawaiian directories to the reigning monarch, in this case, King Kalakaua.
Hawaiian directory 1888-1889
Jacob returned to the Bay Area on the S. S. Alameda on January 12, 1889, and arrived back in San Francisco on January 19. He was away for seven months.
After Jacob returned to Oakland, he relaxed for a few weeks. He then started work on another Sacramento directory project, the 1889-1890 edition, and headed again for Sacramento.
By the spring of 1890, Jacob was ready for another directory project. He was sent back to Hawaii to begin work on the 1890-1891 edition of the Hawaiian Directory – but this time by a different publisher, Pacific Press Publishing Company of Oakland. He left San Francisco on March 27 aboard the S. S. Australia and arrived in Honolulu on April 4. On August 1, he sailed back to San Francisco with the manuscript on the S. S. Australia. He arrived on August 8, having been away a little over four months. The Directory 1890-1891 was published in October 1890 with his name again prominently appearing on the title page, “Edited by J. C. Lane,” and was again dedicated to King Kalakaua.
Kalakaua – King of Hawaii, 1874-1891
Jacob left San Francisco for Hawaii on June 19, 1888, aboard the steamship S.S. Australia. He arrived in Honolulu on June 26, a 2400-mile voyage, seven days later. The Hawaiian Directory 1888-1889 was published in November 1888, with “Edited by J. C. Lane” prominently on the title page. The full-page dedication reads:
Dedication. The Hawaiian Directory is dedicated to King Kalakaua, who, by enlightened and enterprising statesmanship has advanced his realm to a respected rank in the family of independent nations.
Hawaiian directory 1890-1891
After a rest from his assignment in Hawaii, Jacob was ready to return to work. This time he was hired by a different directory publishing company in Sacramento, H. S. Crocker & Co., and was invited back to Sacramento, expressly to produce the 1891-1892 edition. After canvassing the city for several months, the manuscript was ready for the printer in January of 1891. The 1891-1892 directory was made available to the public in the middle of April.
This was the last directory that Jacob worked on. Jacob’s career as a publisher and editor was short lived. According to the California Voter Register of 1892, Jacob’s occupation was no longer “Book Publisher” but “Traveling Salesman,” and by 1896, the California Voter Register listed his occupation as a single word, “Insurance.” In the 1900 census, Jacob’s occupation is recorded as “salesman of school supplies.”
Aside from the publication of the Sacramento 1891-1892 directory, there occurred another important event in Jacob’s life in January 1891. His royal acquaintance, King Kalakaua, died in San Francisco at the Palace Hotel on January 20, just across the Bay from Jacob’s home in Oakland. Kalakaua had come to the United States for a six-week pleasure visit but ended up succumbing to a fatal bout of pneumonia. Jacob had met the king frequently on his directory compilation visits to Hawaii.
Kalakaua’s sister, Liliuokalani, back in Hawaii, was then proclaimed Queen and succeeded her brother as monarch of the Hawaiian Island Kingdom. (F. M. Husted’s company, formerly named McKenney, published another Hawaiian Kingdom directory 1892-1893, without Jacob’s involvement.) In January 1893, however, Queen Liliuokalani was forced to abdicate her throne. Jacob followed the news reports as Hawaii passed first through a Provisional Government, then became a Republic, before finally being taken over in 1898 by the United States government as a Territory.
The following startling story appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, October 23, 1895 (page 7):
A Damaged Passenger
Jacob C. Lane was thrown from a Mission-Street electric car on March 25th last and had one of his legs broken between the knee and ankle. He boarded the car by invitation of W. R. Gibson, superintendent of the road. Gibson acted as motorman, and his lack of skill is held responsible for the fact that the car ran off the main track on to a switch at too high a rate of speed. Lane has filed suit against the Market-Street Railway Company and Gibson to recover $7500 damages.
The San Francisco Call, same date (page 9), had a similar shorter story about the same action:
Was Thrown From A Car
Jacob C. Lane is suing the Market-Street Railway Company for $7500 damages on account of injuries sustained in being thrown from a car March 25.
In 1901, Jacob died suddenly. Family correspondence reveals that Jacob was diabetic and that he was in chronic ill health in his last few years, very possibly aggravated by the broken leg that he endured six years earlier. The following appeared in the Oakland Tribune, April 20, 1901 (page 2):
Brother of Dr. Lane Has Passed Away
Jacob Cooper Lane, brother of Dr. L. C. [Levi Cooper] Lane of Lane’s Hospital, San Francisco, died Thursday night [April 18] at his home, corner of Twentieth Avenue and East Twentieth Street [sic]. Deceased was a travelling man for a San Francisco wholesale house. He had resided in Oakland about fourteen years, was a native of Indiana, aged 49 years, and leaves a wife [Nellie] surviving him.
Jack London was a close friend of both Jacob and Nellie, and London read the William Cullen Bryant poem, “Thanatopsis,” at Jacob’s memorial service.
In two letters, written on the same day of Jacob’s memorial service – April 19, 1901 – London mentions that he was to attend a funeral. To Cornelius Gepfert, London wrote, “Must cut this short, as I’m going to a funeral right away.” To Cloudesley Johns, London wrote, “Have to go and read a poem over a coffin to satisfy the whim of a man who was quick and is now dead, so so long.” These two letters are found in The Letters of Jack London, edited by Earle Labor, Robert C. Leitz, III, and I. Milo Shepard. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988. Volume 1: 1896-1905.
After the service, Jacob was cremated. His ashes were buried in Odd Fellows Cemetery in San Francisco. When the cemetery was closed sometime in the early 1930s, Jacob’s remains were moved to Greenlawn Memorial Park in Colma, California, about 11 miles south of San Francisco.
His wife, Nellie Cleary Lane, lived until January 1932, dying at the age of 78. His daughter, my maternal grandmother, born Edithe Green, then named Edithe Alois Lane, and finally named Edithe Alois Beutler, was only nine years old when her adoptive father died. I wrote about them in detail in my 2018 book, Unsung But Not Forgotten; Family Personalities With Surnames Bassett, Beutler, Bogdon, Charles, Green, Harned, Lane, Morgan, Phelps, Phipps.