Samuel Hermann

Builder of the Hermann-Grima House, New Orleans

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann%E2%80%93Grima_House

Samuel Hermann was born in 1777 in Rodelheim, Germany. He immigrated to Louisiana in 1804 and settled on the German Coast about twenty miles up river from New Orleans. His wife, Marie Emeranthe Becnel, was born in St. John the Baptist Parish in 1776. Samuel and Emeranthe were married in 1806 in St. John the Baptist Church. The Hermanns had four children. They were Samuel, Jr., Louis Florian, Lucien, and Marie Virginie. Samuel worked as an agent and broker for plantation owners and New Orleans merchants. They moved to New Orleans in 1813 and lived in various houses in the French Quarter. Samuel continued to act as a broker and expanded his business into mortgages, stocks and real estate.

The family purchased a lot on St. Louis Street in 1831 and Samuel hired architect, William Brand, to build a new residence. Mr. Brand built a Federal style house for the family. The house is now the Hermann–Grima Historic House Museum. In 1837, the English cotton market crashed, instituting a worldwide financial panic. Mr. Hermann's fortune was eventually lost due to the crash and he sold the home to Felix Grima.

The Hermann family continued to live in the French Quarter with their daughter and her family. Samuel Hermann died in 1851 and Emeranthe Hermann died in 1853. They are both buried in St. Louis Cemetery No.2.

http://www.hgghh.org

Samuel Hermann immigrated to Louisiana from Germany in 1804. Hermann first settled on the German Coast of Louisiana, where he began to make his fortune as a cotton factor. By the 1820s, Hermann was the head of a vast network of cotton factors, making him one of the wealthiest men in New Orleans and, so well known that his hometown paper in Germany recounted his “rags to riches” story. In 1831 he built a Federal-style mansion on St. Louis Street to showcase his fortune and his ties to American commerce. During the Panic of 1837 his Hermann Briggs Company failed. In 1844, a destitute Hermann and his wife and sold their mansion to Felix Grima, a public notary, and moved in with their daughter and her family, dependent on her charity for the rest of their lives.

Portrait: Jean Joseph Vaudechamp (1790-1864), Samuel Hermann, 1834, oil on canvas. Collection of the Hermann-Grima + Gallier Historic Houses, 1974.11.1.