Lymon Merriweather was a Republican member of the San Francisco City Council during the 1870s. Born in Ireland, Merriweather became a wealthy lumber businessman in San Francisco and was an advocate of Chinese labor.
Biography[]
Lymon Merriweather was born in Dublin, Ireland to an Anglo-Irish family. He later emigrated to the United States and became a powerful industrialist in San Francisco, California, and his business teetered on the verge of collapse during the Panic of 1873. In the aftermath, Merriweather hired Chinese cheap labor to work for his business, and, when several of them were murdered by Irish Workingmen in 1878, Merriweather pressured Mayor Samuel Blake to better police Chinatown for both of their sake. Merriweather, a Republican, staunchly opposed Democratic US Senator Robert Crestwood's anti-Chinese platform due to its threat to his inexpensive labor; he later purchased Penny Blake's Mercer Steel business, only to be threatened after Blake adopted anti-Chinese policies and required the industries to pay higher salaries to American working men. Merriweather went on to be elected to the City Council, where he and most of his fellow councilmen hired Chinese labor and resisted councilman Dylan Leary's efforts to secure a Chinese Exclusion Act.