DATELINE: October 1, 1876: California’s richest person died today in San Francisco. James Lick was a man of few friends. He dressed like a vagrant, wandering around the South Bay with a beat up cart, scavenging animal bones to bury in his orchards. Lick was a fine woodworker who hated the fine woodwork in his own home and a skinflint who built his flourmill with mahogany.

An infamous miser, Lick paid his workers well. He was an unassuming man whose monument to himself—an immense pyramid dwarfing the Great Pyramid at Giza—was to be erected in downtown San Francisco. James Lick was California’s richest person, the penny-pincher icon who gave his every penny away.

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