Thomas Thorkildsen

Thomas Thorkildsen was born in 1869 in Wisconsin.[1] His father was a lumberjack who had immigrated from Denmark.[1]

He worked for the Pacific Coast Borax Company, owned by Francis Marion Smith, in Chicago and later at the Death Valley, where Stephen Mather was his boss.[1] He resigned in 1898 and purchased a borax mine in the Frazier Mountain, Ventura County.[1] With Mather, he founded the Thorkildsen-Mather Borax Company.[1][2] In 1905, he purchased another borax mine in Tick Canyon, a canyon in the Santa Clarita Valley.[1] He became a millionnaire thanks to this second mine.[1] Additionally, he became known as the "Borax King."[1]

He married Dora Garinger.[1] In 1912, they moved into a Craftsman-style estate at the top of Alpine Drive overlooking Coldwater Canyon in Beverly Hills, California.[3] It spanned seventeen acres. A year later, they purchased eleven more acres adjacent to it.[3] They sold it to Kirk B. Johnson, an oilman, in 1921.[3] The house was torn down and subdivided in the 1960s.[3] When he divorced, he moved into an estate in Los Feliz, Los Angeles called Briarcliff Manor, which became known for extravagant parties.[1] He died in 1950.[1]