A boy in a Buffalo bookstore, Mr. Bancroft, at the age of nineteen was sent by his employer to establish himself in San Francisco. Opening business in 1856 in the Naglee Building, at Montgomery and Merchant streets, then the center of the finance and trade of the Pacific Coast, Mr. Bancroft paid in rents during the fifteen years that followed a sum equivalent to twice the value of the property at the present day.
Erecting a spacious building to meet his enlarged requirements, Mr. Bancroft moved to Market Street in 1871, and there developed the largest combined mercantile and manufacturing, wholesale and retail, book, stationery and publishing business in the world. This building was burned in 1886, and the present History Building arose in its stead, and was burned in its turn in the late fire. It is to be replaced at once by a still more elegant structure. The History Company and the Bancroft Company were then incorporated, the latter continuing to the present time in New York City as publishers of high-grade art works, one of the most popular at present being “The Book of Wealth,” at $2,500 a copy.
Meanwhile, from the first, Mr. Bancroft became interested in Western American history, and for a period of forty years devoted much of his time to collecting a library of 60,000 volumes and writing and publishing a series of histories in 39 volumes. The library has since passed into the possession of the State University at Berkeley.
Three sons succeed to Mr. Bancroft’s honors and emoluments, to which each will add his quota, and pass the increased heritage on to his descendants, for each is already so well established in thrift and integrity as to make his fortune a matter of no uncertainty. All three are graduates of Harvard, of good ability and native application. Immediately after completing his college course, Paul Bancroft built and successfully organized and equipped St. Dunstan’s, and has since entered upon the business of real estate in San Francisco. Griffing Bancroft is a lawyer in San Diego, having in charge the family’s landed interests in that county. Philip Bancroft is a member of the progressive law firm of Hewlett, Bancroft and Ballantine, with offices in the Monadnock Building.
731 Market Street, also called the Bancroft Building, is named after Mr. Bancroft.
The Bancroft family are the former owners of Dow Jones & Company — publishers of the Wall Street Journal — which is now owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (NewsCorp).
The Bancrofts are a family of publicly-reclusive Boston socialites who inherited The Wall Street Journal from Clarence W. Barron, who as a publisher built up the reputation of that newspaper. Upon Barron's death in 1928, control of the company passed to his stepdaughters Jane and Martha, children of his wife Jesse Waldron. Barron's son-in-law and Jane's husband, Harvard-educated lawyer Hugh Bancroft, ran the company and the paper for the next five years. Suffering from depression, Bancroft committed suicide in 1933 at the age of fifty-four. The family members maintained ownership of the company through ensuing generations, though management was placed in the hands of capable professionals, like Journal editor Bernard Kilgore.
A notable family member of the following generation was Mary Bancroft, Hugh Bancroft's daughter by his first marriage. She worked for U.S. intelligence in Switzerland during World War II.She wrote novels and a memoir, Autobiography of a Spy, before dying in 1997 at age ninety-three. She was survived by six grandchildren and twelve great-grandchildren.
Jane Bancroft's daughter Jessie Bancroft Cox was another prominent member of the second generation. Her husband, son, and grandson — William C. Cox, Bill Cox Jr., and Billy Cox III, respectively — were "the only Bancrofts to have actually worked at Dow Jones since Hugh Bancroft's suicide."
The family members' private pastimes are the genteel pursuits of show-horse breeding, sailing, and farming. However, the family has also produced a speedboat champion and a former airline pilot.
