Cavalier Andrea Sbarboro

Born in Acero in the province of Genoa on November 26, 1839, Andrea Sbarboro first came to the United States in 1842 as a toddler.

 

He grew up in New York, but like so many others, he and his brother Bartolomeo answered the call of California’s Gold Rush when Andrea was just a teenager. Sbarboro learned first-hand what was meant by the newly-coined gold miners’ phrase, “it didn’t pan out.”

 

He retreated from the gold country poorer than he was when he had started. He settled in San Francisco where he found work as a clerk in a grocery store located at 431 Washington Street. He married Maria Dondero, but became a widower only seven years later. During a subsequent visit to Italy, he met Romilda Botto. They fell in love and were married in 1872.

 

Sbarboro continued to work diligently for fifteen years, saving every penny. Eventually, the once poor, simple store clerk, who worked for twenty dollars a month, bought the entire store outright.

 

Sbarboro travelled to Philadelphia where he learned about the operation of “cooperative banks,” which allowed people to deposit their money; that money was then loaned to their neighbors to build homes. This type of banking—a forerunner of credit unions—was new and innovative. He took the idea back to the San Francisco Bay Area and became a principal of numerous such organizations, such as the West Oakland Mutual Loan Association, San Francisco Mutual Loan Association, San Francisco and Oakland Mutual Loan Association, and the San Francisco Home Mutual Loan Association. All were successful and helped Italian-Americans who would otherwise be unable to qualify for a bank loan to build homes for their families.

 

His fiscal acumen and ever-expanding business experience next led him to the wine business. In 1881, Sbarboro established the Italian Swiss Agricultural Colony, buying land and selling the wine made from the grapes that the land produced. He purchased the Truett sheep ranch eighty miles north of San Francisco in Sonoma County. He renamed it “Asti” after the city in Piemonte where his mother was born. One of the original investors was of Swiss origin, thus the name “Italian-Swiss.” The Italian-Swiss Colony vineyards and winery continued to produce high-quality wine more than half a century before the area began to be known as “California’s Wine Country.”

 

The early part of the twentieth century brought about a change of opinion about alcohol consumption, and the threat of prohibition. Sbarboro wrote a pamphlet deriding the arguments of the prohibitionists. The Fight for True Temperance made a bold case against prohibition, pointing out that wine-drinking countries were much less likely to have an alcoholism problem. In spite of his best efforts, the eighteenth amendment to the Constitution became law in 1919, and eventually took its toll on the Italian-Swiss Colony’s bottom line. The venture was sold to Enrico Prati and the two sons of Sbarboro’s winemaker and chemist, Pietro Rossi.

 

Prohibition did not, however, end Sbarboro’s continuing financial success. Twenty years earlier, back in 1899, he incorporated the Italian American Bank. It was the second bank in San Francisco to be owned and operated by and for Italians. It grew steadily and provided stiff competition for John F. Fugazi’s Columbus Savings and Loan, which Sbarboro’s Italian American Bank eventually bought out.

 

In 1904, the King of Italy conferred upon Andrea Sbarboro the title Cavaliere della Corona d’Italia. Cavalier Sbarboro was at the top of his game, and it seemed that the fates were per-manently on his side. That was the case until the calamity of 1906, when the Italian American Bank was destroyed and reduced to cinders. Undaunted, Sbarboro announced that his bank could meet “any possible call for money.” He was asked to be a member of the so-called “Committee of Fifty.” This group was comprised of the most influential community leaders, and was charged with the daunting task of rebuilding San Francisco.

 

San Francisco was indeed rebuilt, and the Italian American Bank continued to prosper. Within a decade after the Great Earthquake and Fire, the bank had three more branches. The new main office of the Italian American Bank opened to much fanfare on January 1, 1923 at the south-east corner of Broadway and Columbus Avenue (today an Italian restaurant called È Tutto Qua).

 

Before he died on February 28, 1923, Sbarboro lived to see his life’s work fully restored. At the time of his death, it was calculated that the once-penniless grocery clerk had left behind assets exceeding fif-teen million dollars.