Butte County
Biographies
ALBERT FREDERICK KELLERMAN
ALBERT FREDERICK KELLERMAN.—A self-made
man who, during years of hard labor, learned the valuable lesson how to save,
and who is now enjoying a substantial prosperity evidenced by his comfortable
home-place, one of the star attractions of the county, is Albert Frederick Kellerman, a native of Prussia, Germany, where he was born
on October 6, 1862. There he attended
the public schools and there are no better in the world; but inasmuch as the
father had died while the son was a mere boy, he was brought up by a
step-father and had to begin early to work for a living. This stepfather was a master shepherd, a
prominent man in those days, because there were large numbers of sheep in the
country and he had charge of many shepherds.
Albert became a shepherd, therefore, and in that line of work he
continued until he set out for the United States.
At the age of
twenty, or six years after he had turned from school to work, Mr. Kellerman landed in America
and soon settled in Wisconsin,
where he had an uncle and an aunt. He
worked as a farmer four months for wages and saved sixty dollars; and adding
this to what he had when he arrived, he found himself with a capital of one
hundred dollars and the proud consciousness that he was already something of a
“boss.” His ambition some day to have a
place of his own stimulated him and increased his self-reliance, and he was not
long in venturing into the lumber camps of Northern Wisconsin and shouldering
his share of the hardships of the woodman’s life; returning in the spring to
the sawmill at Wausau in the same state.
At the latter place he worked for a dollar day, and being a faithful
mill-hand, he certainly earned all that he was paid.
Early in 1894 Mr.
Kellerman first came to the Coast, locating for a
while at Seattle, Wash.,
where he worked at odd jobs. The next
year he came south to California and spent five years at San Francisco, working
for some time on the water-front, excavating and filling in land at a dollar
and a quarter per day. After laboring on
a railroad, he became a time-keeper and had charge, at three dollars a day and
his board, of an excavation machine. He
also kept track of twenty-five teams hauling dirt and aided in the laying of
tracks and switches. In 1900 he came to Salinas,
where he was busy four months on track construction work, and then he returned
to San Francisco, where he resumed
railroad building, filling in flat-land at the corner of Third and Townsend
Streets. Finally, for ten years he was
in Sonora, Tuolumne
County, where he worked in the West
Side Lumbar Company’s mill at forty-five dollars per month.
In 1907, Mr. Kellerman arrived in Gridley, and with his savings he
bought a ranch on the edge of the town, toward the east. He paid one hundred fifty dollars an acre for
the tract; but he soon so improved it that he was able, within three years to
sell it for three hundred dollars an acre.
This single operation was characteristic of Mr. Kellerman’s
way of doing things whatever he had to do with he soon brought to a much higher
and more desirable condition.
Four years after
the purhcase of his first holdings in Gridley, Mr. Kellerman bought his present place of nine acres, also at
the eastern edge of Gridley, and there today he has one of the best-kept places
in the county, sparing no pains in the up-keep and taking pride in the
results. He has five acres devoted to
Phillip and Tustin peaches, and he
also raises the choicest of alfalfa. He
has fifty walnut trees, and in 1916 obtained two hundred pounds of nuts from
eleven trees. His orchard has every
variety of fruits and nuts, and every third tree is a walnut. A beautiful lawn broken by beds of choice
flowers, with unusually fine rose bushes, further adds to the attractiveness of
the place, and he has, besides, a fine garden of vegetables. He also owns a ten-acre ranch near-by, given
to alfalfa, wheat and beans, and having another orchard. A feature of his ranch life is the flock of
Barred Rock chickens, for which the ranch is famous.
Besides being an
active member of the Farmers’ Union in the Gridley
District, Mr. Kellerman is an Odd Fellow and a
Forester, being associated with the Sonora Lodge of Tuolumne County.
Transcribed 5-13-08 Marilyn
R. Pankey.
Source: "History of
Butte County, Cal.," by George C. Mansfield, Pages 957-958, Historic Record Co, Los Angeles, CA, 1918.
©
2008 Marilyn
R. Pankey.
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