Butte County
Biographies
WILLIAM VEALE HELPHINSTINE
WILLIAM VEALE HELPHINSTINE.--Possessed of those qualities which when put in
operation make a success of life, William Veale Helphinstine
is an old settler who crossed the continent with his parents as a lad of eleven
years, on one of the first trains to the Pacific Coast, in October, 1869. A
native of Washington, Daviess County, Ind., he was born April 4, 1858. His
father was a native of the Blue Grass country, Kentucky, the grandfather moving
from Pennsylvania to that state. The father moved to Indiana and married Emily
Veale, a native of Indiana. She now resides, in the evening of her life, with
her children, at the advanced age of eighty-five. The father was a farmer and
enlisted with an Indiana Regiment during the Civil War, serving until its
close, afterward continuing his occupation of farming until 1869, when he sold
his interests in Indiana and brought his family to Butte County, Cal. He
purchased a ranch and broke the first land around Nelson Station, later
entering into horticulture. He died at his home in 1901. He was the father of
two children: Flora, who was the wife of Jack Waste, who was a farmer near
Chico, and both died here; and William Veale.
William Veale Helphinstine
attended the public schools of Indiana, and Chico, Cal., completing his
education in Woodman Academy, Chico. He continued farming with his father,
entering into partnership with him, afterwards starting horticulture with him.
In 1898 he and his father each purchased ten acres, setting it to prunes and
peaches. In the meantime they continued raising grain and leasing land. After
his father’s death, Mr. Helphinstine continued
ranching, frequently putting in as high as four thousand acres of grain in a
season on the Pratt Grant. He has a Best Caterpillar engine of seventy-five
horse-power and a sixty-horse-power Advance steam engine with which he plows,
also uses three eight-mule teams, putting in about two thousand acres of grain in
a year. He uses a Best combined harvester with a
twenty-four foot cut, and has one hundred fifty acres planted to Egyptian corn
and rice, using a J. I. Case thresher to thresh it. He also raises cattle and
hogs. In 1917, he had good crops, principally wheat, and in 1918 he put in
twenty-seven hundred acres of grain, mostly wheat, resulting in a splendid and
large yield.
The marriage of Mr. Helphinstine
took place, October 1, 1879, on Clear Creek, Butte County, and united him to
Miss Virginia Truxell, a native of Roane County,
Tenn., who was the daughter of John D. Truxell,
a native of the Old Dominion, who settled in Tennessee and who served with the
Tennessee Regulars in the Southern Army during the Civil War. He married, in
Tennessee, one of the native daughters of that state, Mary Brandon, and in 1871
brought his family to California, settling near Stockton. In 1873 he moved to
Butte County and bought a ranch near Nelson, where his wife died in 1875, at
the age of thirty-five years. He died in Oroville, in 1915, at the advanced age
of seventy-nine. He was the father of three children: Mrs. Helphinstine;
Ida, now Mrs. Charles Deuel, residing in Kern County; and Fletcher, a dairyman
in Webster District. Mrs. Helphinstine completed her
schooling in the Nelson District.
Mr. and Mrs. Helphinstine
are the parents of three children: Otis M., who died at twenty-four years of
age; Charles William, educated at the University of Nevada and now associated
with his father in agriculture and horticulture; Benjamin N., a graduate of the
Chico State Normal, now an interior and art decorator with B. Altman Company’s
store in New York City.
Mr. Helphinstine
is a member of Chico Lodge, No. 133, I. O. O. F., also a member of Great Oak
Camp, No. 136; W. O. W. Mrs. Helphinstine is a
charter member and past officer of the L. O. T. M., of Chico.
They are both members of the First Presbyterian Church of Chico, and he was for
a time a member of the board of trustees. In his political affiliations, Mr. Helphinstine is a Republican, and was trustee of Webster
School district, and was clerk of the board for some years. Mrs. Helphinstine is an active temperance worker, a
Prohibitionist and a member and President of the Federated Woman’s Christian
Temperance Union of Chico.
Transcribed by Marie Hassard
13 May 2008.
Source:
"History of Butte County, Cal.," by George C. Mansfield, Pages
915-916, Historic Record
Co, Los Angeles, CA, 1918.
© 2008 Marie Hassard.
Golden Nugget Library's Butte County Biographies