In A History of Watauga County, North Carolina, John Preston Arthur makes a few passing mentions of an early merchant of Boone:  “Jacob Rintels, who had been in copartnership wth Samuel Witkowsky [sic] above Elkville on the Yadkin River, came to Boone and rented Sheriff Jack Horton’s store room, where he remained for about one year, removing his stock of goods to the store room and residence which had been built by Jordan Councill, Jr., for his son, James W. Councill, on the land now occupied by the residence of J. D. Councill, opposite the Blair hotel.”  He continues, “Rintels got Milly Bass, a respectable white woman, to keep house there for him, and W. L. Bryan [later Boone’s first mayor] boarded there while he clerked for Rintels.  He occupied this building for a year or two, when Rintels moved to Statesville.  W. L. Bryan bought the debts due Rintels and then, with Moretz Wessenfeld, opened a store in the same building.”  

Later in his volume, Arthur writes, “While in Boone Colonel Bryan clerked for Jacob Rintils [sic], and made shoes for Jack Horton.  Rintils [sic] having moved to Statesville about 1858, where he married Betty Wallace, a sister of Isaac and David Wallace, Colonel Bryan followed him there, and clerked for him a few months, after which he returned to Boone and carried on business for Rintils [sic] in the James H. Tatum store till early in the Civil War.”  

Finally, Arthur shares that when D. C. McCanles was Sheriff of Watauga County, “he had the proceeds of a claim which as sheriff he held against Wilson Burleson….  This money…had been placed by McCanless [sic] with Jacob Rintels in Boone, in whose store Col. W. L. Bryan was then clerking, then known as the Jack Horton Old Store.  Late that sixth of January [1859] McCanless [sic] called on Rintels for the money, with the request that as much as possible be paid in gold and silver.  This was done.”

So who was Jacob Rintels and why is he noteworthy?  Lacking evidence to the contrary, it turns out that he was likely Boone’s first Jewish citizen.

Rintels, born in 1836, was a German Jew.  A native of Blomberg in the Lippe district and Detmold administrative region of present-day Germany, he emigrated from Prussia to America as a teenager.  In the mid-1850’s, he arrived in Charlotte, North Carolina about the same time as Samuel Wittkowsy (another Prussian and Jewish immigrant), and the two met as co-workers, clerking for Levi Drucker, who owned a mercantile in Charlotte and was a leader in the Jewish community there.  In 1850, there were only nine Jewish families living in Charlotte, and by the start of the Civil War, they had involved themselves in the dry goods, tannery, grocery, furniture, and clothing trades.  Rintels and Wittkowsky were to become two of the most successful of these.  

In the fall of 1856, Rintels and Wittkowsky formed a partnership, Rintels & Co., with joint capital of $450, and opened a general store in Ellendale, Alexander County with a branch established in 1857 on the Yadkin River in Caldwell County that Wittkowsky managed.  Soon after the Ellendale store was moved to Boone, Wittkowsky sold his interest to Rintels in the spring of 1858 and moved briefly to Winnsboro, South Carolina.  Their partnership dissolved, Rintels moved to Statesville, North Carolina.  There, in 1860, he married Elizabeth “Bessie” Wallace (also a native of Germany), with whose brother, Isaac, Rintels had entered a new mercantile partnership that same year.  

In 1861, Rintels and Wittkowsky were reunited when they opened a store in Statesville.  With the commencement of the Civil War, Rintels went to New York with what money he could gather.  He and Wittkowsky "reasoned that one side or the other must lose; that the South, even if successful, would...be bankrupted."  Unfortunately, Rintels lost all of his and Wittkowsky's money on Wall Street, and Wittkowsky had to send Rintels other funds just to be able to return home.  While still at Statesville, Wittkowsky involved himself in the hatmaking industry but sold out after the war.  Soon after, back in Charlotte, they established the firm of Wittkowsky & Rintels which was located on Mint Street and prospered as a major wholesale mercantile.  The store was expanded in 1868 and again in 1870, in which year they transacted $175,000.  By the early 1870s, Wittkowsky and Rintels were among the wealthiest men in their community.  They expanded into the retail market in 1874, leasing a building on West Trade Street.  Ten years into their last partnership, their business occupied a three-story building with assets worth $800,000.

Rintels is described as “the more flamboyant and colorful of the two entrepreneurs [who] enjoyed the making and spending of money.”  He died in 1876 at the age of 40, the result of a stroke that had paralyzed him.  The local Masonic lodge, of which Rintels was a member, formed his funeral procession and a Jewish rabbi conducted his service.  Afterwards, the funeral cortege included a “line of carriages nearly a mile long.”  It reportedly took mourners three hours to walk almost two miles from his Victorian-style mansion near the intersection of Trade and Tryon Streets to the Hebrew Cemetery.  

Samuel Wittkowsky, born in 1835, was a native of what is now Poznan, Poland and arrived in New York from Prussia in 1853 at the age of 18.  He traveled to Charleston, South Carolina before settling in Charlotte in 1855 and meeting Jacob Rintels.  In 1871, he married Carrie Bauman.  After Rintels’s death in 1876, Wittkowsky continued in the wholesale/retail business, became the first elected president of Charlotte’s Chamber of Commerce and helped start the Mechanics Perpetual Building & Loan Association, which later became the Home Federal Savings and Loan Association.  He was a Mason and a city alderman.  

During the Civil War, of the eleven Charlotte Jewish volunteers in the Confederate Army, six were young men whom Wittkowsky and Rintels had hired from New York to work in their dry goods store.  Another interesting piece of Civil War trivia concerning Wittkowsky is that, at the end of the war, while he was living in Statesville, federal officers were ordered to arrest North Carolina Governor Zebulon Vance and only had pack horses to take him away.  Sparing Vance that embarrassment, Wittkowsky intervened and convinced the officers to allow him to deliver Vance to the train depot in his carriage.  

Wittkowsky died of a heart attack in 1911 and is buried in Charlotte’s Elmwood Cemetery.