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We have local notable D. H. Wulzen Jr (and his grandsons’ worthy efforts) to thank for many of the pictures we have of the young Eurka Valley. Warren, one of those grandsons, kindly sent me this short biographical sketch.

For purposes of this website, the following text is copyright 2022, Warren Wulzen. Reproduced with my deep gratitde.

Dietrich Heinrich Wulzen, Jr. (AKA Dick, Henry, but often just ‘DH’), was born at the corner of Davis and Clay Streets in 1862.

His father, DHW Sr., had emigrated from Wechold, Niedersachsen, Germany in 1850, sailing around the Horn with two brothers. The elder DHW found that catering to the thirst and hunger of the male populace was his calling. He also speculated in real estate with a particular fondness for corner lots. In 1859 he married Anna Catharina Maria Margaretha Rippe, who had arrived in SF in 1857 from the same part of Germany as a servant to a well-to-do blacksmith. They had five boys, three of whom lived to adulthood.

DHW Jr was a bright lad. He attended the U of C and went on to graduate from the School of Pharmacy at the Affiliated Colleges in 1881. He served an apprenticeship with Langley & Michaels’ Pharmaceutical firm for five years. By the time he completed his apprenticeship in 1886, his father DHW Sr. had built the Wulzen Pharmacy (the building marked “Drugs” visible in that photo) at the southwest gore point of Market, 17th and Castro streets. The drug business thrived and the building also housed a post office branch, two other shops and the Wulzen family living quarters upstairs.

Late in the 1890s, DHW took on a Kodak agency and he became seriously interested in more than just snapshots. He acquired an 8x10 and a 5x7 glass plate camera. His pharmaceutical training made the necessary chemical processes for coating the plates and developing the photos easy for him. (Sidenote, our father, Frank Eastman Wulzen, learned these processes in DHW’s darkroom and later became a commercial photographer himself.)

DHW joined the California Camera Club and befriended prominent photographers. He went on CCC trips to Yosemite in 1898 and 1901, and traveled around the west with friends and family, but his constant subject was the city of his birth, and especially the Eureka Valley area. Over the course of 40 years he took thousands of photos, most of which he passed on to Dad, and my brother Alan and I still have several hundred. (I am working on an inventory, which is still incomplete) Dad labored to donate as many of the negatives of historically significant photos as he could to various collections: SF City Library, Golden Gate NRA, Yosemite NP, etc. Of those, we still have quality prints, and most can be seen in on-line venues.

The Wulzen family has put all of DHW’s photos into the public domain. Dad stressed that his father was an amateur photographer and took the definition of amateur seriously, so we do not sell these photos and try to proscribe anyone else from attempting to profit from them. We accept remuneration for the actual costs of reproducing them when cash outlay is needed to get quality copies, but as much as possible we try to freely provide these photos to anyone.