Frederick Vogel

Friedrich Vogel (May 8, 1823 – October 23, 1892), more commonly known by the Americanized version of his name as Frederick Vogel, Sr., was an American tanner and businessman from Milwaukee, Wisconsin who spent a single one-year term as a member of the Wisconsin State Assembly. Together with his cousin Guido Pfister, he founded the Pfister & Vogel tannery.

Vogel was born in Kirchheim unter Teck in the Kingdom of Württemberg on May 8, 1823, son of Johann Michael Vogel, a tanner. He received an academic education, and went into the family trade.

In 1848, Vogel's cousin, Jacob F. Schoellkopf, asked him to leave Württemberg and join him in the United States. He lived for a while in Buffalo, New York and eventually Vogel, bankrolled by Schoellkopf, settled in Milwaukee and opened a tannery in collaboration with his other cousin, Guido Pfister, who kept a leather goods store. With Pfister's help, he built a small tannery which sold its leather through Pfister's Buffalo Leather Company. In 1853 Vogel and Pfister went into partnership. During the early 1850s, Vogel also established tanneries in Chicago and Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Jacob F. Schoellkopf's oldest son, Henry Schoellkopf, learned the leather trade and later worked with Vogel’s partner, Guido Pfister, in Wisconsin. Soon thereafter, Henry Schoellkopf married Vogel's daughter, Emily Vogel in 1875. Prior to Henry's early death in 1880, Henry partnered with Vogel and Guido Pfister and opened a tannery in northeast Wisconsin that eventually “became the largest in the world prior to World War I.”

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