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Posts tagged ‘David Oppenheimer’

David Oppenheimer: Germany to Vancouver

Featured: Alter Markt, facing southwest to the former Schloss Blieskastel at upper-centre: Blieskastel, Saarland, Germany (X70).

David Oppenheimer: ✵ 1 January 1834 – 31 December 1897 ✟

As a child of the city, I learned the name of Vancouver’s 2nd mayor, David Oppenheimer, who served in the top post from 1887 to 1891. Escaping the violent revolutions spreading through Europe, David Oppenheimer and his brothers had long been immigrants from Germany, and after time in New Orleans and California, they arrived in what is now southwestern British Columbia and developed business success with their supply stores during the Gold Rush, and with wholesale trade and real estate in the newly incorporated city of Vancouver, where the national railway established its western terminus one year later in 1887. The Oppenheimers stamped their civic legacy not only with the location of the railway terminus, but also with an expansive infrastructure program including a new grand city park, fire department, extensive roadworks, a city-wide electricity grid, streetcar public transport network, and a city cemetery. On 11 April 2008, the Government of Canada’s Historic Sites and Monuments Board designated David Oppenheimer as a National Historic Person.

There’s little doubt the Oppenheimers spent plenty of time in what are now Vancouver’s Chinatown and Strathcona with their business interests and connections to the city’s Jewish community. These are neighbourhoods, respectively, where my parents sought closer ties with the Chinese-Canadian community, and where they bought a new house to raise their family. Decades later, I’ve flown out from Vancouver, and I’ve been on the train from Frankfurt to southwest Germany’s Saarbrücken for its proximity to the Völklingen Ironworks world heritage site. I also recently learned David Oppenheimer was from the area and born in the city of Blieskastel. I arrange to meet with a representative of Stadtarchiv Blieskastel (city archive), and I make my way to Blieskastel to see what I can learn about the Oppenheimer family.

( Click here for images and more )

24T08 Blieskastel’s Oppenheimer families

E07, outside Saarbrücken

My visit to Blieskastel’s city archives taught me there were many who shared the surname Oppenheimer. As future immigrant to Canada and becoming Vancouver’s 2nd mayor, David Oppenheimer (1834-1897) grew up in the house at Kardinal-Wendel-Straße 58. Seeing in-person at the city archives the book containing Oppenheimer’s birth certificate was “historic.” A number of David’s relatives including his mother are buried in the city’s modest Jewish cemetery.

Not related to David’s family was Anna Oppenheimer who once lived in the house at Kardinal-Wendel-Straße 62 in the early 20th-century. The Stolperstein (stumbling stone) embedded in the cobblestone outside the latter address tells us Anna was deported by NS-forces in 1940 and died on the way to Theriesenstadt.

With a total population of about 20-thousand, Blieskastel is served by hourly-frequency regional-trains with a 30-minute trip from Saarbrücken (SB).

Kardinal-Wendel-Straße 58, where David Oppenheimer spent his childhood.
Kardinal-Wendel-Straße 60-62: another Oppenheimer family, not related to David’s.
Book containing David Oppenheimer’s birth certificate (Stadtarchiv).
David Oppenheimer, born 1. January 1834 in Blieskastel (Stadtarchiv).
Entering the city of Blieskastel in the rural district of Saar-Palatinate (Saarpfalz-Kreis).

I made the images above with an iPhone15 on 15 May 2024. I couldn’t have done this research without the help of R. Berger at the city’s archives. This post composed with Jetpack for iOS appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com.