Henry Lesinsky
From left to right: Henry Lesinsky, Clifton, Arizona on the San Francisco River
Henry Lesinsky was a Jewish pioneer who gained immense wealth by exploiting the rich copper mines of southeastern Arizona.
Lesinsky was born in Prussian Poland in 1836 into a family related to the Freudenthals, some of whom had found success in merchandising in Santa Fe. At the age of fourteen Henry was sent by his father to London, where he was supposed to study stone and wood carving. After four years in London, the young Lesinsky lost interest in his apprenticeship, and in 1854, at the age of eighteen, he departed for Australia. In Australia, he worked in mines for another four years before moving on to California in 1858, where mining was already experiencing a decline. By the late 1860s, Lesinsky was in New Mexico with his uncle, Julius Freudenthal. There, he bought grain for government contracts and managed two general stores, one in Las Cruces and the other in Silver City. At this point, feeling sufficiently enriched, Lesinsky returned to Europe, where he married his wife Mathilda and they had two children.
When the family returned to America, Henry tried to open a store in Tucson without success. In 1872, one of Lesinky’s employees alerted him to the rich ore potential surrounding the San Francisco River. Needing no more convincing, a team of six, including Lesinsky and five other heavily-armed men, set off into Apache-dominated territory in southeastern Arizona, looking for the supposed claims. They eventually found them, near what is now the town of Clifton, and Lesinsky and Julius Freudenthal paid Robert and James Metcalf, the original discoverers of the claims, $10,000 for majority interests. The mines didn’t immediately turn a profit, causing the Metcalfs to sell their interests for $20,000 and prompting Lesinsky, in 1874, to create the Longfellow Copper Company. Lesinsky was president, his brother Charles was vice president, and Julius was their contact in New York.
Apache attacks, the long distances that ore had to travel for smelting, and the difficulty in importing goods all hindered the mines’ profit and production. (Silver City, the nearest important settlement, was eighty miles away.) As a remedy, Lesinsky built a twenty-inch rail line between his mines and the mill. The entrepreneurs also lacked a heat source that was sufficiently hot to smelt the copper ore. Even though his in-law, Isadore Solomon, helped greatly by manufacturing mesquite charcoal in the Gila River Valley, Lesinsky’s smelters were incapable of handling the immense heat put out by this new heat source. It was only in 1876, with the discovery that copper-lined smelters could handle this heat, that the Longfellow mines started to become profitable, and they soon began producing 75,000 pounds of copper per month.
While Henry Lesinsky was innovative and persistent, he was also greedy. For example, after agreeing to pay his workers a certain wage, he would pay them in Mexican currency instead of American dollars, effectively decreasing their pay. Additionally, the payment certificates that they received could only be used at company stores, and the company saloon was known to water down the drinks that workers purchased in their off time. Lesinsky’s most outrageous tactic, however, may have been his importation of Chinese laborers, who he paid a dismal rate and subjected to unacceptable working conditions. Throughout the 1870s the value of his properties continued to increase, even after the Lesinsky family came back to the United States after a year-long tour of Europe in the 1880s. This steady growth was due largely to the newfound need for copper as a conduit in electric appliances. As a result, Henry Lesinsky sold his mines, his little railroad, and his smelter to Scottish capitalists in 1882, for a total of $1,250,000. After accumulating this vast sum over ten years of work, Lesinsky moved to New York, where he died in 1924.
Cholent and Chorizo, by Abraham Chanin
Jewish Settlers in the Arizona Territory, by Blaine Lamb
Pioneering Jews: A New Life in the Southwest, by Harriet and Fred Rochlin
Photo credits: Bloom Southwest Jewish Archives
Photo credits: Mining Foundation of the Southwest