Meyers & Co. Meyers & Co.

Meyers & Co.

There is no evidence known that certainly identifies Meyers & Co. as being any firm in business in San Francisco or elsewhere. It used to be thought that the firm named was the well known Meyer & Co. of Philadelphia and the round brass slugs known with that ethnic and an enigmatic Troy weight designation were patterns for a proposed territorial coinage. It now appears that Meyer & Co. of Philadelphia were scale makers of the 1840s and 1850s and that the brass slugs were nothing more than scale weights denominated in Troy ounces. We suggest the proprietor of Meyers & Co. was William Meyer and Company of San Francisco (although there is no explanation for the different spellings of the name). Mentioned in a notice on page 2 of the February 28, 1852 Weekly Alta California, the William Meyer firm is described as having just received a small lot of gold dust from Sydney, Australia which was valued at about $16.25 per ounce. This was the first the paper had noticed as arriving from the southern continent and was considered worthy of reporting. Although the evidence is slim, it seems to suggest that this Meyer & Company had some interest in gold and some connection to the business surrounding it. Whether that is enough to identify William Meyer as Meyers & Co will be up to each collector to decide for himself. Further searches through the newspaper archives of the time may help to shed more light on this question.

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