Butte County
Biographies
GEORGE W. BOWMAN
GEORGE W. BOWMAN.--The name of California
is a magnet, attracting to her cities able men from the various walks of
industrial life. In George W. Bowman, foreman of the case and veneering
department of the Diamond Match Company at Chico,
we note a man of ability, who by strict attention to business has won a place
for himself in the chosen vocation.
Of
English birth and parentage, Mr. Bowman was born at Briar Hill, Staffordshire,
England, September 22, 1869. The third child in a family of ten
children, when only ten months old his parents brought him to Pittsburg,
Pa., where his father, Charles Padgett
Bowman, an expert heater, or Iron furnace man, who learned his trade in
England, and found employment with Jones and Laughlin, Iron-furnacemen. For thirty years he was heater at the
furnaces, and died at Pittsburg, Pa.,
in 1915, at the advanced age of seventy-nine years fairly well to do. Mr.
Bowman’s mother, in maidenhood Mary Lane,
is still living at the old Bowman house, 2707 Cobden
Street Pittsburg.
George
W. was educated in the Common Schools and beginning at the age of eighteen, served an apprenticeship
under his father, working nine years for Jones and Laughlin and becoming a
master of the of iron making as heater and furnace. He was next employed with
the Birmingham Rolling Mill Company, at Birmingham,
Ala., in 1898 and 1899. He returned to Pittsburg
and entered the employ of the Carnegie Steel Company at Homestead,
Pa., continuing with them until he went to Buffalo,
N. Y., in 1903-4, where he was employed by the Lackawanna Steel Company, taking
charge of heating furnaces at the Universal Plate Mill. Returning to Homestead
he was engaged with the Schoen Steel Wheel Company at McKee’s Rocks, and later
with the Consolidated United States Steel Company, resigning from the latter
place when he came west to Oregon,
in 1910. In the latter part of that year he came to Chico
and purchased a sixty-acre grain and alfalfa ranch, three miles north of Chico,
which he now rents to other parties.
Mr.
Bowman was married at Youngstown, N. Y., to Mrs. Ida E.
McQuiston, nee Wadsworth, widow
of Dr. McQuiston of Pittsburg, Pa.
she is the daughter of Henry and Margaret (McKnight) Wadsworth
and was born at Library, Allegheny County, Pa.
She received her education in the common schools, and by her first husband
became the mother of four children, namely: Edith, who became Mrs. Joseph
Manifold of Washington, Pa., and
died at the age of twenty-eight, leaving one child, Virginia,
nine years of age; Beulah, now Mrs. S. B. Minton of Beaver, Pa.; John, who is
single, a chemist in the employ of the Diamond Match Company in their potash
plant at Long Beach, Cal.; and Harold, single a graduate of the University of
Nevada, a civil engineer in the employ of the Government.
In
1913, Mr. Bowman built the beautiful bungalow on Val ambrosia Avenue, Chico,
where he and his accomplished wife enjoy the comforts of a modern home. They
are inclined to the Christian Scientist faith and have many friends at Chico,
which is ever ready to welcome people of Mr. and Mrs. Bowman’s worth.
Transcribed
by Kim Buck.
Source: "History of
Butte County, Cal.," by George C. Mansfield, Pages 837-838, Historic Record Co, Los Angeles, CA, 1918.
© 2008 Kim
Buck.
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