Butte County
Biographies
MARY ANN POWELL BAYNON
MARY ANN POWELL BAYNON.--A brainy
and talented woman who, by years of hard work and unremitting attention to the
most necessary and exacting of details, has come to be one of the leading
landowners in Butte County, as well as one of the county’s wealthiest women, is
Mrs. Mary Ann (Powell) Baynon, the far-sighted and aggressive stockholder in
the Sacramento Valley Bank. She was born at Pembroke Dock, South Wales, and
grew up in her father’s humble home at the Government navy yard there. Her
father, James Powell, was a ship-carpenter, and so were all his six sons who,
with four daughters, made up the family of children. Five of the children are
now living, and Mrs. Baynon is the only one in California or, in fact, in
America. Her father, who was also a joiner, a master-mechanic and a
carriage-maker as well as a ship-builder, became independently well-to-do, and
so had some reward for his long and strenuous life. Her mother had been Mary
Evans before her marriage; and she, too, lived and died in Wales.
After attending a Welsh national school
for girls, Mary Powell went out to work for a living at an early age, taking a
position as domestic and cook; and in Wales she was married for the first time,
choosing William Baynon as her husband. He died eight years later and left one
child, a daughter, Florence Minnie, who was reared by her mother and Mrs.
Baynon’s second husband. She is now the wife of W. G. Pearne, the real estate
and grain broker at Biggs, and the mother of four children: William George,
Victoria A., Frederick A., and Mary Alice. After the death of her first
husband, which occurred in Wales, Mrs. Baynon, with her baby daughter, came to
Biggs, in 1880, and soon after married her present husband, James Baynon, an
own brother of William Baynon, a prosperous farmer owning thirteen hundred
acres of land in the West Biggs precinct. He was born in South Wales on
Christmas Day, 1840, a member of a family of seven children, two of whom,
brothers, are still living in their native country. His father was Tom Baynon,
who died when James was only two years of age; while his mother had been Eliza
Evans. Both lived and died in Wales.
James Baynon left home when he was young,
worked out on farms and in a livery barn, and later at the copper works at
Swansea, and in 1863 came to America. He was variously engaged in Pennsylvania
and New York, and in 1866 came to California, crossing the Isthmus. He stopped
at Stockton, where he worked out by the month on farms, and in 1872 came to
Butte County and bought his first tract of one hundred sixty acres. To this he
has added, from time to time, until he now owns thirteen hundred acres of very
choice grain land about seven miles northwest of Biggs. How valuable this land
is may be judged from his yield of barley, twenty-five sacks per acre in 1917.
Mrs. Baynon, who is a stockholder in that
enterprising and substantial financial institution of such value to this
section of the state, the Sacramento Valley Bank, owns two ranches. One is of
three hundred twenty acres near Biggs, the other of four hundred eighty acres,
near the Baynon ranch, making eight hundred acres that she both possesses and
manages. She belongs to the Episcopal Church, is a generous contributor to the
Red Cross, and in national politics, or matters were local interests are not
paramount, follows the standards of the Republican party.
Besides rearing and educating Mrs.
Baynon’s daughter, Florence Minnie, Mr. and Mrs. Baynon sought to bring up an
only son, a most promising youth, who accidentally shot himself, in 1904, at
the tender age of twelve. The lad was a general favorite, and this fact,
coupled with the circumstances of his tragic end, called forth the largest
funeral cortege ever seen in Biggs. His memory but accentuates the universal
esteem in which this good leader among women, his mother, is held.
Transcribed by Marie Hassard 14 May 2008.
Source:
"History of Butte County, Cal.," by George C. Mansfield, Pages
896-899, Historic Record
Co, Los Angeles, CA, 1918.
© 2008 Marie Hassard.
Golden Nugget Library's Butte County Biographies