At 21, Louis Sohns joined the 1848 German Revolution, which erupted in various states across the German Confederation. His alma mater, Heidelberg University, was the intellectual center of the upheaval. The revolt split, with professionals demanding freedom of speech and an end to feudal laws while the laboring class sought stricter control.
The liberal uprising failed because the aristocracy favored despotism and forced revolutionaries out. To avoid political backlash, many left for America. Because he spoke English flawlessly, young Sohns readily posed as an English professor to escape.
Reaching the United States in 1850, Sohns enlisted in the U.S. Army as a musician, which assigned the private to the Fourth Infantry. He cruised with the regiment in the Atlantic, crossed the isthmus at Panama to the Pacific, then sailed up to Fort Vancouver, where he arrived with Brevet Capt. Ulysses S. Grant in 1852.
Upon leaving the Army, Sohns made his home in Vancouver, working as a contract painter and paperhanger, as well as a wallpaper salesman for a local store. He was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1856 and married Tirza Schuele and raised five children.
Sohns and his brother-in-law D.F. Schuele started a general store in 1866. Shortly after, Sohns constructed a brick building between Fifth and Sixth streets. Sohns and Schuele shipped 2.5 million wooden barrel hoops to San Francisco in 1874 and 4 million two years later, evidence of their success.
As a community leader, Sohns established the First National Bank in 1883 and created the town’s first water system in 1868, which used bored-out logs to deliver tens of thousands of gallons to residents. He directed the area’s largest business, the Michigan Mill.
In 1877, he helped sort out the confusion about the overlapping claims of the Short family, St. James Mission and Vancouver Barracks.
Sohns invested well. He put money in the first telephone company, owned stock in the Puget Sound and Columbia River Railroad Company and the Vancouver, Klickitat and Yakima Railroad. He joined fraternal organizations and became the grandmaster of the Grand Lodge of the Washington Territory.
In 1860, Clark County elected Sohns as treasurer. He was twice elected mayor (1875 and 1889) and a legislator at the constitutional convention for Washington statehood in 1889. (Strangely, reports of the convention misspelled his first name as Lewis.)
During his first stint as mayor, Sohns signed an ordinance that hobbled “certain animals” to prevent their roving the streets. All went well until the arrest of Mary Schofield’s cow. Defending her bovine, Schofield launched a pro-meandering campaign that caused years of brouhaha before the city council settled the issue by corralling livestock in Esther Short Park. Later, Sohns helped establish the park for people rather than animals.
Grant, after his presidency and a trip around the world, made a brief stop at Vancouver in 1879. Sohns and Vancouver’s citizens met the former commander-in-chief at the waterfront with band music and torch carriers who led the war hero to the Vancouver Barracks parade ground for enthusiastic ceremonies. When President James Garfield died in 1881, Sohns created a resolution to honor the president’s funeral and closed all county businesses.
Martin Middlewood is editor of the Clark County Historical Society Annual. Reach him at ClarkCoHist@gmail.com.
