Firmin René Desloge
Firmin René Desloge was a U.S. businessman who founded lead mines and other mercantile businesses. He was the progenitor of the Desloge Family in America, whose Missouri business interests included fur trading, hardware, clothing, lead mining, smelting and ore trading, and distilling.
Career
In 1806, Firmin's uncle Jean Ferdinand Rozier immigrated to the Louisiana Purchase territory of Missouri. He was accompanied by his business partner John James Audubon on a journey funded by Desloge's maternal grandfather, Claude Rozier.Firmin followed in 1823, and was introduced by his uncle and Audubon to the businesses of fur trading and mercantile interests along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and lead smelting and mining in Potosi, Missouri. St. Genevieve, a Mississippi River town populated largely by French immigrants and their descendants, was a hub for trading with Indians and new white arrivals to the frontier.
Desloge began to focus on lead mining. He had a nose for lead veins and geology, and began with open-ground diggings, some left open by Native Americans and frustrated miners. He built a smelting furnace around 1824 as an extension of his Potosi mercantile business.
Desloge became a naturalized citizen of Missouri in 1828.His son, Firmin Vincent Desloge, expanded the family mining and mercantile operations, becoming one of the richest men in the world at his death in 1929. Around 1932, Desloge's estate was valued at more than $52 million.