Andrew Jackson Bryant

Andrew Jackson Bryant, known as A.J. Bryant, (1823–1888) was the seventeenth mayor of San Francisco, California, serving from December 1875 to December 1879 during a lengthy economic depression that struck San Francisco and the rest of the country. Bryant was a strong advocate for an eight-hour work day as well as legislation to halt the immigration of Chinese laborers into the state. A prominent insurance man and a sportsman, he drowned in the San Francisco Bay after falling from a ferryboat.

As per his obituary, Bryant was born in Effingham, New Hampshire on October 30, 1831. As a young man, he sailed around the tip of South America to San Francisco, where he arrived in 1850 and went directly to the Gold Country of California. After a "year's hard work," however, he returned to San Francisco "for medical treatment," and then went to Benicia, California, where in 1854–55 was the city marshal and in 1856 he was a deputy sheriff.

In 1856 the California Legislature met in Benicia, and when it disbanded, Bryant moved to Sacramento, the new state capital, where he opened a general merchandising business with George W. Chesley and George L. Bradley, which lasted four years. He then "sold out, going into the wholesale liquor business" with a Mr. Morrison." He moved back to San Francisco and worked in such enterprises as an insurance agency and an express business.

Bryant was married twice, having six children by his first wife, his oldest daughter later becoming the wife of Mayor William Russell Grace of New York City. His second marriage was in 1870. In 1877 another daughter, Mary J., married George Avery.

In San Francisco he became active in the Democratic Party, and in 1866 President Andrew Johnson commissioned him a naval officer "with all the honors and benefits to be derived therefrom." William Heintz, his biographer, said that Bryant "kept this position until 1870 without ever sailing beyond the Golden Gate."

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