Nathan Cole
Nathan Cole (July 26, 1825 – March 4, 1904) was a nineteenth-century politician, merchant and businessman from Missouri.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Cole attended common schools as a child and later took a partial course at Shurtleff College. He engaged in mercantile pursuits in St. Louis, was a director of the Bank of Commerce for forty-three years, most of which time he was also vice president of the bank, and was a director in a number of insurance and other corporations. Cole served as Mayor of St. Louis, Missouri from 1869 to 1871, was president of the Merchants' Exchange in 1876 and was elected a Republican to the United States House of Representatives in 1876, serving from 1877 to 1879, being unsuccessful for re-election in 1878. Afterward, he resumed his former business activities in St. Louis until his death there on March 4, 1904. He was interred in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis.
His son, Nathan Cole Jr., was one of the founders of the Los Angeles Times, in 1881.
Nathan Cole Jr.
Nathan Cole Jr. (1860–1921) was one of the two founders of the Los Angeles Daily Times, now the Los Angeles Times. The son of a wealthy St. Louis, Missouri politician and banker, he was just 21 years old in 1881 when he and a colleague, Thomas Gardiner, put together the first issues of the new venture to be printed on the presses of the Mirror Publishing Company. Later he was a real estate man and a Los Angeles city police commissioner.
Cole worked on a St. Louis newspaper, then traveled west to Portland, Oregon, and to Woodland, California. He came to Los Angeles specifically to start a newspaper, which ran into financial difficulty and was taken over by General Harrison Gray Otis in 1882. Cole returned to St. Louis, where he went into business with his father, Nathan Sr., who had been a U.S. Representative in Congress and Mayor of St. Louis. Cole soon returned to Los Angeles, where he remained until he died on December 7, 1921.
He began his Los Angeles career as a Republican editing a Republican newspaper, but he switched to the Democrats and became a leader of the local party. He was a Democratic committeeman in the first presidential election campaign of Woodrow Wilson. Cole was an early member of the Jonathan Club and was a Mason and a member of the Sons of the Revolution. He was appointed to the police commission by Mayor Arthur C. Harper.
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