Butte County
Biographies
HENRY OSCAR JACOBSON
HENRY OSCAR JACOBSON.--The production of rice, a comparatively new industry in California, is fast becoming one of the important industries of the state, bringing in rich revenues from land formerly considered useless and adding one more crop to the harvest of this land of plenty. The Dodge Land Company, operating in Butte and Glenn Counties, is now (1917) the largest rice growing concern in the United States, cropping seventy-three hundred acres of the cereal, a crop averaging well up to fifty sacks per acre and valued at one million dollars. Thirty caterpillar engines were at work at one time, putting in the crop, and about as many are engaged in threshing the rice, one thousand men being employed in harvesting, threshing and marketing the 1917 crop. The company, incorporated under the laws of California, was organized in 1915, and began operating in the fall of that year. The personnel of the company is as follows: Dr. Washington Dodge, president; H. O. Jacobson, vice-president and manager; T. C. Tognazzini, secretary and treasurer. The head office is located in San Francisco, and the main working offices in Butte County, fifteen miles southwest of Chico. In 1918 this body of enterprising men will cultivate twenty sections of land in Butte and Glenn Counties, about half the land being in each county. Of the twenty sections, three will be in wheat, four in barley, and the balance in rice. The immensity of this undertaking can readily be seen, as also its inestimable value to the resources of the two counties.
As superintendent and manager of this vast enterprise, Mr. Jacobson has met with almost phenomenal success. An excellent organizer, full of enthusiasm for the wonderful work he is pushing forward, and with the executive ability so necessary in a business organization, but which many men of a correspondingly large vision lack, he is proving beyond all doubt the right man at the head of this gigantic undertaking. Like so many of the men who are doing big things today, Henry Oscar Jacobson is of Norwegian extraction, the progenitor of the Jacobson family having immigrated to America in 1844, settling in Wisconsin, at Koshkonong Prairie, Dane County, which was and now is an important Norwegian settlement. The grandfather of H. O. Jacobson, Halvor Jacobson, a pioneer of Wisconsin, was one of the big operators in the tobacco industry of that state, being known as the “Tobacco King” of Wisconsin. His son, Jacob M., is one of the well-known farmers and land-owners at Koshkonong Prairie, where he and his wife, Anne Lande (Ravenaas) Jacobson still reside. They are the parents of two children, Henry Oscar, of this review, and Mildred, wife of Nordahl Anderson, of Koshkonong Prairie.
Born June 6, 1883, Henry Oscar Jacobson received his early education in the public schools of Dane County, Wis., and at the Albion Academy, a semi-military school. He then entered the University of Wisconsin, at Madison, where he pursued a special agricultural engineer’s course, graduating with the class of 1904. After some time spent in assisting his father in his large business interests, he traveled extensively in the northwest, in fact, visited the various states of the Middle West, from Canada to the Rio Grande, during these years being variously engaged at different places.
While in North Dakota, Mr. Jacobson became acquainted with Alexander McKenzie, “Honest John” Burke, then Governor of North Dakota, now United States Treasurer; Senator Gronna, and many other men prominent in political life--which acquaintance led to an appointment by the government, to a position for which he had become particularly qualified through his work at the University. He was put in charge of the plant industry in the Philippine Islands, being under the War Department and serving as a division chief. His work was with the tobacco, cocoanut, sugar, rice and Indian corn crops of the Islands, finally specialized to rice-growing. Under his direction the acreage of Indian corn was increased one hundred per cent., and the yield per acre, seventy-four per cent. He standardized the production of rice and evolved six new varieties.
Mr. Jacobson was also sent to China and Japan, including Formosa, by the United States government, in propagating and improving new varieties of rice and other food products. While abroad he succeeded in securing a portion of a copy of a Chinese Encyclopedia of Agriculture, written in the fourteenth century. The missing portion of this work was destroyed in the Boxer Revolution. That part secured by Mr. Jacobson is now in the hands of the United States Government at Washington; in this work, written more than five hundred years ago, certain fruit trees were described and located, and five hundred years thereafter representatives of our government, by the help of this work, were able to locate and classify many valuable varieties of fruits.
Mr. Jacobson prepared the American Rice Exhibit from the Philippine group for the Panama-Pacific Exposition, involving twenty-five hundred varieties of rice, this exhibit being awarded the Grand Prize, in competition with Japan, China, and all other rice-growing countries--no small honor. He returned to the United States, November 17, 1916. In his work in the Philippines he had made the acquaintance of certain San Francisco capitalists, which led to his connection with the Dodge Land Company, an association which is proving most satisfactory to all parties concerned. He has recently purchased, from the Miller Estate, twenty-one hundred acres adjoining the holdings of the land company, which will be worked in conjunction with the company’s property, in 1918.
In all his undertakings, Mr. Jacobson has shown the true spirit of his race, that of doing whatever he undertakes to the best of his ability, never relinquishing his efforts until he has reached the goal, a trait which has made possible the wonderful discoveries, geographically and scientifically, by men of Norwegian blood. Mr. Jacobson gives it as his opinion that the adobe lands cultivated as rice-lands, in Butte, Colusa and Glenn Counties of the Sacramento Valley, will in time become great beef, mutton and pork producers. His study of conditions here shows that alfalfa, cotton, rye-grass, barley and wheat can all be successfully grown here, in rotation with rice, and with this possibility it is easy to foresee that cattle, sheep and hogs will be raised at very low cost.
The marriage of Mr. Jacobson, which took place at Huron, S. Dak., united him with Miss Ruby Dorothea Madsen, a native of that city, and the daughter of John C. and Johanna (Cerka) Madsen. Mr. and Mrs. Jacobson have had two children: John M. and Robert H.
Transcribed
by Roseann Kerby.
Source: "History of
Butte County, Cal.," by George C. Mansfield, Pages 1111-1112, Historic Record Co, Los Angeles, CA, 1918.
© 2009 Roseann Kerby.
Golden Nugget Library's Butte County Biographies