Ottendorfer, Anna Sartorius Uhl

Anna Sartorius Uhl Ottendorfer, née Anna Sartorius or Anna Behr, (born Feb. 13, 1815, Würzburg, Bavaria [now in Germany]—died April 1, 1884, New York, N.Y., U.S.), publisher and philanthropist who helped establish a major German-American newspaper and contributed liberally to German-American institutions.

Anna Sartorius received a scanty education. About 1836 she immigrated to the United States and settled in New York City. Sources are divided over whether her marriage to Jacob Uhl, a printer, took place before or after she moved to the United States. In either case, by 1844 they had bought a print shop and along with it the contract for printing the weekly New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung. They bought the newspaper outright the following year. Together—Anna Uhl shared in the editorial, business, and even composing room and press work involved—they built the paper into a successful institution that was distributed to other cities with sizable German communities as well. It soon became a triweekly and then in 1849 a daily. From the death of her husband in 1852, Anna Uhl managed the entire enterprise. In 1859 she married Oswald Ottendorfer, a Moravian immigrant who had joined the Staats-Zeitung in 1851 and had become editor in 1858. She served thereafter as general manager of the paper.

In later years Anna Ottendorfer took up philanthropy. In 1875 she contributed $100,000 to build the Isabella Home for elderly women of German ancestry in Astoria, Long Island. A similar gift in 1881 established the Hermann Uhl Memorial Fund, named for a deceased son, to support the study of the German language in American schools, principally through the German-American Teachers’ College of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. To the New York German Hospital she gave a women’s pavilion in 1882 and a German dispensary and reading room in 1884, gifts totaling $225,000. She gave lesser amounts to other institutions in Brooklyn, New York, in Newark, New Jersey, and elsewhere, and her will left another $250,000 to various German-American institutions.