Augustus and Henrietta Ulrich as a young couple. Did these pearls help build Springfield? (Von Reisenkampff-Ulrich Family History)
Henrietta Ulrich, the story goes, sold her fabulous pearl necklace to buy what became the near west side of Springfield. Sadly, the story probably isn’t true.
As a young woman, Ulrich (1797-1887) hobnobbed with Russian aristocrats and married into German gentry. Whether or not her pearls played a role, at her death Ulrich was a real-estate developer, part-owner of a lumber company, and in general one of Springfield’s most successful early businesswomen.
Ulrich was born Henrietta Von Reisenkampff in Reval, Russia (today’s Talinn, Estonia). Her father, Justus von Reisenkampff, was collector of the port of Reval, which, because of its rail connection to St. Petersburg, was one of the Russian Empire’s most important shipping hubs.
She married Augustus Ulrich (1786-1841), a prosperous St. Petersburg merchant, in 1814. However, according to a later account by one of their sons, Bartow Ulrich, “arbitrary and sudden changes” in government policy forced Augustus out of business three years later. He moved first to London but eventually decided to relocate to the U.S.
He intended to enter into the mercantile business in New York City. The cargo of goods which he ordered from Europe was entirely lost by an unfortunate shipwreck. This discouraged him, and he resolved at last to settle in Rahway, New Jersey, and turn his attention to the manufacturing of cloth, of which he possessed a good theoretical knowledge …
Ulrich’s woolen factory in Rahway burned to the ground, but his career revived when John Jacob Astor hired him to manage an Astor woolen mill.
Augustus died in 1841. Henrietta, left in debt with several small children, moved to Springfield, where a married older daughter already lived.
Bartow Ulrich (1840-1930), Henrietta’s youngest son, wrote at least two histories of the Ulrich-von Reisenkampff family, History of Family August Louis Ulrich (1874) and The Von Reisenkampff-Ulrich Family History (1907). The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library has a copy of the first; the second is readable online. Both booklets take long detours into Christian sermonizing, but much of what we know about Henrietta Ulrich’s early life comes from Bartow’s accounts.
Unfortunately, neither pamphlet says anything about Henrietta using her pearls as seed money (although both do reproduce a painting of a young Henrietta wearing a double strand of pearls). Instead, the story about the pearls appears in an article Springfield showman William Dodd Chenery wrote for the Illinois State Journal in 1937. Chenery attributed the anecdote to what seems to have been a third Bartow Ulrich memoir, Essays of Bartow A. Ulrich and Family History, written sometime before 1914. SangamonLink couldn’t find a copy of the Essays in 2025, but here’s what Chenery wrote:
Through all the vicissitudes of her life, Mrs. Ulrich had preserved the magnificent pearls of her early court life and now sold them to finance her western venture.
Through proceeds of their sale she purchased a farm of eighty acres of ground, then outside the corporation (city) limits. The northeast corner of her farm was at the present intersection of College and Cook streets. It ran west to Walnut and south from Cook. It was then prairie …
Henrietta Ulrich in her Springfield years (Von Reisenkampff-Ulrich Family History)
In a 1998 paper for the Illinois History Colloquium, historian Dr. Stacy Lynn gave a more prosaic – and more likely – explanation of where Henrietta came up with the capital for her land dealings.
Just prior to her departure from New York, her older sister in St. Petersburg sent her 1,500 rubles, and that amount probably represented most of what she brought with her to Illinois. In March 1842, she purchased eighty acres of land in Springfield from Stephen Logan, who was at the time Abraham Lincoln’s law partner, by signing a $600 promissory note and agreeing to pay the full amount plus interest within two years.
The family was in debt and struggling, but in January of the following year, an important letter arrived. Henrietta Ulrich’s sister in Russia wrote, “With God’s will, this unexpected good fortune will help you in freeing you of the larger part of your debts.” The letter included 3,000 rubles.
Henrietta Ulrich was obviously smart and aggressive. However, Lynn wrote, she could not have made her mark on Springfield if she been married instead of a widow.
Illinois statutes allowed unmarried women full discretion in buying, selling and managing their property. In contrast, married women in Illinois lived in a legal state of coverture and were not allowed the same privileges regarding land. …
Beginning in late 1845 and early 1846, Henrietta Ulrich began buying and selling property across Springfield. The initial eighty acres that she had purchased in 1842 were well situated near the town square and bordered the affluent neighborhood adjacent to the property of the governor’s mansion. In the late 1840s, she sold some of that property and purchased more. By 1850, she had accumulated $4,000 in real estate holdings, which was more property than the typical successful farmer in Sangamon County possessed.
“Henrietta Ulrich’s increasing wealth placed her family with Springfield’s economic and social elite,” Lynn wrote. “… She was tough minded, a risk taker, shrewd, intelligent, and she possessed an impressive head for business.”
In addition to real estate, Ulrich also invested in what became Springfield’s longest-lasting lumberyard. Chenery, who lived in Henrietta’s former home at College and Cook streets, wrote about the lumber partnership too. However, he definitely got some of those facts wrong. According to Chenery’s version:
During the building of the homestead Mrs. Ulrich lived in the two-story house built by Pascal P. Enos … on (a) site now occupied by the Vredenburgh Lumber Co. offices at Third and Jefferson streets. Mrs. Ulrich and her son, Charles A. Ulrich, started a lumber yard on that site, that, after the marriage of one of her daughters to a Vredenburgh, became the Vredenburgh Lumber Co.
It actually was Henrietta’s son who married a Vredenburgh daughter, not the other way around – and the son’s name was Edward, not Charles (Henrietta didn’t have a son named Charles). Henrietta and Edward Ulrich (1829-1909) went into the lumber business with John S. Vredenburgh (1809-1879), father of Edward’s wife Maria (1833-1910), in the mid-1850s. John Vredenburgh and his son Peter (1837-1925) bought out E.R. Ulrich & Co. in 1864, and the Vredenburgh Lumber Co. remained at Third and Jefferson until 1982. By that time, Vredenburgh Lumber was thought to be the oldest family-owned lumberyard in Illinois.
One last observation by Chenery:
Another illustration of (Henrietta’s) advanced ideas was that in laying out her farm, after living on it over 15 years, she made each lot 100 feet wide and 300 feet deep, with Canedy street 100 feet wide, the widest in all Springfield. Could she have had vision of the coming days of the automobile?
Henrietta Ulrich, age 90, died at the home of another daughter, Augusta Mack, in Carthage, Ill., in 1887. She is buried in Oak Ridge Cemetery. Henrietta Street, which runs from Cook Street to South Grand Avenue one block east of Walnut Street, is named after her.
Hat tip: To Dr. Stacy Lynn (the former Stacy Pratt McDermott) of Ramapo College of New Jersey for providing SangamonLink with a copy of her 1998 paper, “Women, Business, and the Law: The Story of Henrietta Ulrich.” Lynn, who previously was with the Papers of Abraham Lincoln in Springfield, is the author of Loving Lincoln: A Personal History of the Women Who Shaped Lincoln’s Life and Legacy (Southern Illinois University Press, 2025).
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