Pacific Improvement Company
affiliate of the Southern Pacific Railroad
The Pacific Improvement Company (PIC) was a large holding company in California and an affiliate of the Southern Pacific Railroad. It was formed in 1878, by the Big Four, who were influential businessmen, philanthropists and railroad tycoons who funded the Central Pacific Railroad, (C.P.R.R.). These men were: Leland Stanford (1824–1893), Collis Potter Huntington (1821–1900), Mark Hopkins (1813–1878), and Charles Crocker (1822–1888). They owned the company, each with 25% interest. Archived records date from 1869 to 1931.
The company has been identified with many endeavors, including building the Hotel Del Monte in 1880, a large resort hotel in Monterey, California. By the 1880s, the Pacific Improvement Company was one of the largest corporations in the Western United States. The company controlled dozens of subsidiary companies, which conducted shipping, mining, publishing, land development, resort hotels, electric streetcars, and water system. Although it was criticized as a holding company to extract profits, the PIC had an important impact on the history of California. PIC was an active participant in the cause to erase Chinese American presence through actions such as tearing down any attempt to rebuild their fishing community.
“Pacific Improvement Company” enters the record as affiliate of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Pacific, Improvement and Company can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pacific Improvement Company” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.