The James Flood Mansion, at 1000 California Street,
stands at the top of Nob Hill in San Francisco. It is a monument
to a fortune that was dug from a fault zone in Nevada. The mansion
is built of sandstone from the other side of the continent. It
is one of only two Nob Hill structures to have survived the 1906
San Francisco earthquake and fire.
Nob Hill is so steep that horse-drawn vehicles couldn't climb it safely. After the 1870's, when cable cars conquered it, it became a fashionable address for those who had made fortunes in mining, railroads, and business. Its name may be as much a reference to the "nabobs" (rich society people) who lived there as to its knobby shape.
James C. Flood was one of four men who controlled the bonanza mines of Nevada's Comstock Lodethe richest silver mines in history. He was born in New York City in 1826 and came to San Francisco in 1849 after finishing an apprenticeship as a coachmaker. He eventually opened the Auction Lunch, a bar across the street from a trading house, with his partner, William S. O'Brien. Once silver was discovered in in 1859, Flood and O'Brien began to speculate in mining stock, and in 1868, they sold the bar and became brokers. A few years later they formed a partnership with two Virginia City, NV men, James G. Fair and John W. Mackay. The four of them formed the Consolidated Virginia Mining Company and purchased claims along the Comstock Lode. Their claims turned out to be sitting on top of the richest silver mine in the world.
Through a combination of luck and ruthless business practices, the four men amassed enormous fortunes. They formed a monopoly, awarding contracts for mining supplies to timber and water companies that they owned themselves. After the silver ore ran out, they invested in real estate and railroads, and spent much of their time maintaining their fortunes. James Flood was worth $30 million in 1880's dollars, or about $20 billion today.
At the time, many fashionable people in Boston and New York were building homes of Connecticut River Valley red sandstone, also known as brownstone. Today you can still see such houses in Boston's Back Bay and Beacon Hill neighborhoods, and in many parts of New York. Not wanting to be outdone by anyone back east, Flood ordered stone from Connecticut and built a 42-room brownstone mansion in the middle of San Francisco between 1885 and 1886. The sandstone was quarried at the Middlesex Quarry Company in Portland, Connecticut, cut and dressed in Newark, New Jersey, and sent by ship around the tip of South America to San Francisco. The mansion cost $1.5 million--nearly $26 million in 1998 dollars. The stone was expensive, and the mansion required enormous amounts of it. Shipping around Cape Horn was hazardous because of perpetually bad weather, and many ships didn't complete the trip. This added to the financial risk of building the house.
In 1906, an enormous earthquake and fire ripped through the city. All but two structures on Nob Hill collapsed or burned to the ground; the Flood mansion and the nearly completed Fairmont Hotel, though gutted, remained standing. Today, the Fairmont, also built with silver money, is still the most luxurious hotel in the city. The Flood mansion, with two wings added after the earthquake, now houses the exclusive Pacific Union Club.
The Flood mansion is a square, massive building.
Its reddish-brown stone stands out among the grey granite and
white stucco that prevail in San Francisco architecture. A fence
made of bronze and thick slabs of Connecticut brownstone encloses
the grounds. If you look closely at the stone, you can see layers
in it. Those layers are the petrified bed of a river
that flowed through what is now Connecticut some 200 million years
ago.