Patrick Joseph Silk : Short Biography

Patrick Joseph Silk was born on January 12, 1861, in Beech Hill.  He was baptized at Bullaun Church on February 10th and his godparents were Michael and Catherine Silk (relationship unknown).  Little is known about his childhood specifically, but one can assume he grew up assisting his father with the herds and on the farm.  There had been general public education in Ireland from 1831 and the Mahon family had opened and supported three schools in their lands around Beech Hill and Castlerea, but there is no way to know if Patrick attended school.  The California Great Register of 1892 and the 1900 US Census did state that he could read and write. 

It is not clear exactly what prompted Patrick’s immigration or when or on what ship he came to America, but he and his sister Mary listed 1880 as their immigration year on later census records.  They appear for the first time in San Francisco’s Langley Directory in 1882.  They lived at 510 Mission Street and Patrick’s occupation is listed as laborer, though the next year he was a bartender at his uncle William Molloy’s saloon on Third Street.  He lived with his uncle on Sherwood Place that year, Mary having married and moved out.  When his mother and siblings came to San Francisco the next year, he moved in with them at 1428 Mission Street, near 10th.  In 1885, Patrick became a teamster and drove a beer wagon for the Jackson Brewery for much of the rest of his life.  His brother Jim would later join him at that job. 

St. Joseph’s Parish was where Patrick and his family lived.  In 1883, this was the site of the founding of the YMI, the Young Men’s Institute.  According to the YMI website,

In the late 1800's Irish immigrants in America were subject to a great deal of social and political discrimination. So it wasn't surprising that conversations among Irish Catholics turned frequently to the necessity of organizing. Such a conversation was held on an evening in 1883 by a group of men who stopped to talk "under a lamppost" after a service in front of St. Joseph's parish hall in San Francisco. 

Somewhere along the way, Patrick joined the YMI and was a member of Parlor #3 until his death.  That same Father Scanlon that sanctioned the beginnings of the YMI would officiate Patrick’s marriage to Ellen Raftery.  Ellen Mary Raftery was born on January 9, 1865, in Ballinahatna, Castleblakeney, Galway.  The Civil parish was Clonbrock and the church parish was Ahascragh.  She was the youngest of the seven children of John Raftery and Mary Grealy.  Every time she got married, she got younger.  Her three marriage certificates and her death certificate gave different birth dates and none matched the civil record in Ireland. Ellen came to America in 1885 and was working as a live-in domestic at 1928 Octavia in Pacific Heights.  It is unknown where or how she and Patrick met, but they were married on March 13, 1887, at St. Joseph’s Church.

They moved to 1006 Minna, just a couple of blocks from the rest of the family and that was where their first child, Mary Alice (named after Patrick’s sister), was born.  In 1889, they moved to the north side of Bernal Heights.  Bernal Heights was part of a Mexican land grant to José Cornelio Bernal.  By 1860, it was owned by François Louis Alfred Pioche, who subdivided it into smaller lots.  It had not developed much as a neighborhood before the Earthquake.  Most of the hill was open pasture and it had been known as Nanny Goat Hill because the Irish in the Mission let their livestock graze it.  The base of the north side developed first along Precita Creek as the Mission District crept across Army Street.  Precita means “damned, condemned to Hell.”   After the Quake and Fire, refugee shacks were thrown up by the Department of Lands and Buildings of the Relief Corporation on the hill.  A few of them still stand today. 

For the next three years, they lived on Prospect near Coso and had second daughter, Ellen, who unfortunately died at 9 days old.   Patrick bought a large family plot at Holy Cross Cemetery in Colma and Ellen was the first Silk buried there.  Patrick’s mother and siblings lived with them on Bernal Heights, but each sibling moved out as they got married.  Most of the marriages, baptisms, and funerals occurred at St. Paul’s Church. 

They opened a neighborhood grocery and liquor store named PJ Silk’s two blocks away at the corner of Powell and California Avenues.  (These street names are no longer on the map.  Because of confusion with the other California and Powell Streets downtown, the names were changed in 1909 to Coleridge and Powers, respectively.) When Patrick’s sister Delia married new immigrant Martin O’Rourke, Martin worked there as a clerk for a while before becoming a teamster.  Patrick’s youngest brother Michael got his start in the store as well.  Later, it would become Silk Brothers. 

The Gay Nineties were a great time for Patrick and Ellen for the most part.  The City was expanding and opportunities were plentiful.  In 1890, the family bought a lot from Elizabeth Morgan at the corner of Precita and Coso for $5.  In 1891, Patrick had bought two more lots on Napolean near Orleans from M Zimmerman for $3, but they never built anything there.   On Precita, they began to build a house.  The architects were Martens & Coffey, and the contractor was M. Loftus.  (All three men had descendants who attended St. Ignatius and were taught or coached by Patrick’s great grandson.)  The building had seven rooms and a bathroom upstairs and a storefront with two back rooms downstairs.  There was also a two-room building at the back of the lot that later was turned into a studio apartment.  It cost $3500 to build.  In 2012, the house sold for $1.225 million.  The downstairs was then remodeled and the building was converted to condominiums.

The family moved into a house down the block at 6 Precita Avenue, while their new house was being built.  While there, they took in a boarder or two, usually at least one was a clerk at PJ Silk’s.  The water at the new house was finally turned on November 27, 1893.  Initially, the house’s address was #8.  Later, as more houses were built on the block, it became #28 Precita.  Ellen ran a boarding house which accommodated six or more men at a time.  Ellen (and her daughter Juel) would have worked as cook, laundress, and house cleaner.  Because she had been married three times, her daughter Catherine and granddaughter Dolores called it the “happy hunting ground” because they thought that was where Ellen found her husbands.  Her third marriage was to a lodger, but not at the Precita house.  Two cousins did find husbands in her boarding house, though.  In the 1900 US Census, residents included Ellen’s two nephews Patrick and Luke Sweeney, John Leonard—a nephew of Patrick’s brother-in-law John J. Leonard —Thomas Shaughnessy, Frank Cunningham, and Steve McCue (or McHugh).  McCue and Cunningham worked at the store, while the others were day laborers.

In the storefront at 6 Precita, Patrick opened Silk’s Hall, where many district political conventions and fraternity meetings were held. The picture below is of Mission at Precita in 1926.  The building on the left would have been Silk’s Hall.

The Hall was an active and exciting place.  It appeared by name in the newspaper 42 times over the next 10 years.  One article referred to the Hall as “the center of this unpaved neighborhood.”  The most interesting article was from August 17, 1900, when the headline was “There Was Fun at Silk’s Hall.” 

There was a small sized circus at the Democratic meeting in Silk’s Hall on last Wednesday night.  President H. J. Stafford did not appear, as it is supposed he expected there would be a noisy meeting and he did not desire to participate. In his absence, the vice president, William Byrne, occupied the seat of honor, and had the pleasure of hearing William Bell tell Thomas Curran what he thought of him.  Curran, it must be remembered, is an aspirant for Senatorial honors from the Nineteenth Senatorial District.  As a thorn in his side, he suspects that Bell is not his friend.  After that meeting Curran will no longer have any misgivings on this subject.  The meeting was delayed pending the arrival of Curran, who came in at 9:30 o'clock very much affected by the influence of the Bernal Heights foggy climate.  On his arrival, he sought a sideshow interview with Bell, who, he said, would lose his job in Golden Gate Park unless Bell supported him in his fight for a seat in the Senate.  This made Bell hot, and he lost no time in informing Curran that he held his position in the park through the good will of A. B. Spreckels, and he (Curran) or no other man could oust him.  This manly assertion on Bell's part precipitated a small sized row, which had the effect of breaking up the meeting in good Kilkenny-cat style.

The family continued to grow.  At the end of July, 1890, they had their first son, John Joseph, known as Jack.  But in December of 1892, tragedy struck as their oldest daughter Mary Alice died from meningitis.  Ellen was nine months pregnant at the time and gave birth to her third daughter—Julia Frances, who would always be known as Juel—just one day after burying her first daughter.  Juel would later name her own daughter Alice in her sister’s memory.  It would be six years before Ellen became pregnant again.

On August 2, 1892, Patrick became a naturalized citizen.  The Great Register of that year described him as 31 years old, 5’ 11.75” tall with brown hair, blue eyes, and a light complexion (by 1896 his complexion was ruddy), and with a scar on his forehead.  At nearly 6 feet, Patrick was the biggest of the brothers and bigger than all his brothers-in-law.  Despite the grocery and boarding house, his occupation was listed as “driver.”  In 1896, his occupation was “teamster,” but, in 1898, it was “merchant.”

In 1897, Ellen and Patrick celebrated their 10th Anniversary.  They threw a party for more than 200 people, presumably at Silk’s Hall, which made the Society Page of the Chronicle.  A complete list of attendees was given.  Members of the YMI and of The Tribe of Ben-Hur, Mizpah Court No. 1 (a group Ellen belonged to) as well as many family members were present.  

The “Railway Victory” seems to be the beginning of a change of fortunes for Ellen and Patrick.  In 1898, Patrick and Michael separated the two grocery stores that were Silk Brothers, Patrick keeping the one on Precita and Michael taking the one at California and Powell Avenues.  Michael had moved out of the boarding house and into the apartment over the second store.  Six years after their daughter Juel was born, Ellen became pregnant again, and another daughter, Gertrude Marian, was born in May of 1899. 

Also in 1899, Patrick and Ellen refinanced the house, borrowing $7500 from The Columbia Banking Company.  Patrick seems to have used part of the money to buy into the Mission Brewery.  His cousin Patrick F Silk was a driver for them and Patrick J and John Hasselwander became new partners with the owners Constantine Haible and Frank Schnitzer.  Patrick got out of the grocery business by turning the store over to his assistants Steven McCue and Frank Cunningham, and it became McHugh Grocery.  It did not fair well, though and, in February of 1901, an auction was held at the store by the New York Auction Company to sell off all the stock, as well as the fixtures and showcases.  By 1902, both Patrick’s and Michael’s grocery stores were gone. 

1901 was a difficult year all around.  The grocery store closed in February.  Ellen’s nephew Luke went to Montana to visit another Raftery relative, came down with pneumonia, and died.  His body was sent back to San Francisco for Ellen to bury.  The Mission Brewery was fined by the federal government for tax evasion because it distributed unstamped beer.  This was probably the “bookkeeping shenanigans” of which Patrick’s great granddaughter Carol Schneider would later hear.  The partners had to pay $5000 in penalties, plus court costs and expenses.  On top of that, John Hasselwander, on of the partners, had died of pneumonia in late 1900, and his widow sued the remaining partners to return his investment to her.  It is unknown what the cost was, but Patrick also got out of the partnership shortly thereafter.  Constantine Haible committed suicide a year later, and Frank Schnitzer kept the brewery running until it finally folded in 1904.    

After the store auction, the family moved to 15 Hampton place, off Howard Street.  Hampton Place no longer exists.  It has been covered over by the North Annex of the Moscone Center.  Two of the boarders from 28 Precita, John Sweeney and Thomas Shaughnessy, were still boarding with them, but the rest of the boarders had scattered.  They rented the Precita property to the Samuel Stevens family for the next three years.  Patrick went back to work for the Jackson Brewery.  Ellen was again pregnant, and Patrick’s second son Thomas L was born on July 19th, 1901, at Hampton Place.  Thomas was born premature and they tried to keep him alive by putting him in a cotton–filled cigar box behind the stove as an improvised incubator, but he only lived seven hours.  Poor little Tommy does not even have his name on the headstone of the family plot.  Ellen quickly became pregnant once again in 1902.  In December, another daughter, Catherine, was born at Hampton Place.  Catherine survived, but she would be their final child.

In the early summer, Patrick came down with pneumonia.  He died on June 18th, 1903, at their home.  He was only 42 years old.  His funeral was two days later, starting at the home on Hampton Place, followed by a requiem mass at St. Patrick’s and burial at Holy Cross Cemetery.  According to his obituary, Patrick was “a well known resident of the city.  He was identified with many Catholic and Irish societies and was highly esteemed.”  Besides the YMI, Patrick had belonged to Lodge 247 of the Ancient Order of United Workmen, St. Patrick’s Mutual Alliance Association, Ancient Order of the Hibernians Division No 17, and Leo Assembly No. 4 of the Young Men’s Catholic Union. 

Patrick was an active and popular member of the community.  Besides running the local hall and being in the YMI, he had a dog named Lady B which he entered in coursing events.  Coursing is the ancient forerunner of dog racing and involved dogs—usually greyhounds—chasing down a rabbit, catching them by speed rather than scent.  It involved gambling and was a popular sport among the City Irish at the time.  It had a space on the Sports Page of the Chronicle.  Patrick was even elected treasurer of the Pacific Coast Coursing Club in September of 1892 and helped organize the Thanksgiving event where the prize was $1000.   

In 1894, Patrick served as the aid to grand marshal of the St. Patrick’s Day parade and as aid to the grand marshal of the 4th of July Parade.  In September, he was elected delegate from the 35th District to the Democratic Municipal Convention.  In 1899, he was appointed to a permanent committee of the newly organized Regular Democratic Club of the Thirty-Fifth Assembly District.  Also in 1894, Patrick and Ellen bought a lot 101 on Coso between Precita and California Avenue from Catherine Powell for $10.  Nothing was ever built there. 

Patrick’s story is one of the American Dream tragically cut short.  The financial stability and social status for which he strove dissipated with his death and his family struggled afterward.  He and his wife died younger than anyone else in his generation (other than his two siblings who died in childhood).  He witnessed the deaths of three of his seven children, whereas only one of his siblings lost a child.  The future which had looked so bright in 1893 had all fallen apart within ten years.  His children struggled on and did eventually achieve stability and success for their descendants, but they did not do so with the cohesiveness maintained by their various groups of cousins.  It was Patrick’s daring in coming to America that made their achievements possible, but his independence from his siblings and his early death also served as a counterexample of how one might achieve the dream he had sought.