User:Xpctr8/drafts/Emil Clemens Horst



Emil Clemens Horst (18 March 1867 – 24 May 1940) was an inventor, and major grower and merchant of hops around Sacramento, California. At his peak, Horst cultivated the more acres of hops than any other grower in the world.

Horst emigrated to the U.S. as a child in 1874 from Tuttlingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. He married Daisy Brown of Sacramento around 1898, and had four children.

Acquisition of ranches
In the mid 1880s he purchased a small plot of land just east of Daniel P. Durst, the first Bear River hop grower, as site of his first hop farm. He soon bought out two other hop growers, Hugh Roddan and Joseph M.C.Jasper. (See Wheatland, CA doc for details and ref.)

He married in 1898, and moved to San Francisco in 1902. By 1904 he was supplying Oregon hops to the Guinness Brewery in Ireland. By 1912, Horst owned the largest number of acres of hops under cultivation in the world with offices in Chicago, New York and London. Horst Company was headquartered at 150 Pine Street, San Francisco, California. Prior to World War II, Horst Company was the only exporter of hops to Germany.

The cultivation of hops requires rich flood plains. One of Horst’s oldest and most productive hop ranches was the site of Campus Commons in Sacramento along the American River. Another nearby ranch of Horst's was based in Horstville, a company town nearby Wheatland, California in the Bear River flood plain. It has rich loamy soil, that geologists even named after Horst, like Horst Sandy Loam and Horst Silt Loam.

Horstville consisted of a post office, dining hall, company store and a tent city for seasonal workers. In 1886, labor shortages and threats of a strike by white workers had become serious; hop growers founded the California Hop Growers’ Association, and hired Chinese workers. By 1898 Horst had become so big that ten hop drying kilns ran daily. Simultaneously hop labor camp conditions had become "unspeakably bad throughout the state and the pay was equally abysmal" so that by 1899 the Horst Brothers ranch's 300 white and a number of Japanese employees quit and went on strike for more pay. To recruit workers Horst launched advertising campaigns not only by making false promises but advertised for at least twice as many workers than they actually needed, with the goal to play one group off against the other, as he admitted before the U.S. Immigration Commission Hop production peaked between 1912 and 1916 and plummeted thereafter. On 3 August 1913 the Durst Ranch became the site of the Wheatland Hop Riot. Until 2009, when Google released a digitized version of the 1916 Commission on Industrial Relations, the Horstville ranch was often confused with the neighboring Durst Ranch.

Horst revolutionized the processing of hops with the invention of his mechanical hop separator, patented 1909 in Elk Grove, California. It picked the hops while discarding the bine and leaves. It produced 25 bales of hops in one day, while an experienced worker picked just two bales in a week, allowing him to bypass the hassles of hiring seasonal labor. Horst continuously invented new hop related machinery (1884-1924) holding at least 14 patents. The harvesting process was further developed in 1939 (US Patent #2139046) by his son-in-law, Edouard Thys, founder of Thys Company which, among other industrial parts, manufactured the parts for the portable hop picking machine.

See
A film produced between 1900 and 1910 entitled Horst Hop Ranch, depicts the processing of hops and their shipment to market. Blanking remainder of text as copyright violation, see source in section heading

Patents
Horst received at least 14 patents during his life, all of which related to automatic hop harvesting machines. (correct?)

(INSERT TABLE - Date | Pat. No./link | Title | notes?)

TODO

 * Information on various inventions and patents for hop harvesting machines
 * Details on hiring migrant workers, Horstville, strike when automatic machine was first implemented
 * Rewrite paragraph on film for possible copyright issue.