Butte County
Biographies
JACOB FRANK KEIFER
JACOB FRANK KEIFER.—One of the most
successful ranchers in the Gridley district, in Butte County, and a scientific
farmer who delights in making experiments with the soil and in planting, is
Jacob Frank Keifer, who was born in Beaver County,
Pa., on March 18, 1871. He enjoyed the usual advantages, by no means
meager, of the country schools of Pennsylvania, and when through with his
school books, he worked at farming in his native state.
During the first ten years following his
arrival in California, in March, 1900, Mr. Keifer
worked successively in the oil-fields of Coalinga, Los Angeles and McKittrick. Again returning to Coalinga, he was employed at
drilling, and gained much valuable experience. He came to know the problems
involved in that heavy and exacting work, and by hard labor and steady
application succeeded. In 1910, he bought twenty acres of land two and a half
miles southeast of Gridley, and in two years he bought twenty acres more. This
choice property he immediately began to improve, so that he has now brought the
land to a high state of cultivation. His plow-land is especially well
developed, and such is his success in the raising of alfalfa, alone, that he
gets no less than five cuttings a year and averages from seven to eight tons
per acre.
Mr. Keifer also has a dairy of sixteen
high-grade cows, and he is a stockholder in the Gridley Creamery. He maintains
a family orchard which more than supplies his needs. Among his experiments is
one with red beets, which he is trying out as cow feed with considerable success.
He has a fine herd of blooded Poland-China hogs. Mr. Keifer
takes pride in keeping his place in fine shape, and is especially pleased to
show his sanitary dairy barn, with its cement floors and other appointments in
keeping with the last word in scientific dairying. Having risen steadily step
by step as a self-made man, and so come to realize the value of intelligent
attention to details, and of unremitting industry, Mr. Keifer
sees to it that, come what may, he attends to business first, last and all the time.
On August 31, 1893, at Beaver, Pa., Mr. Keifer married Miss Jennie Brunton,
also a native of Beaver County, Pa., and by her he has had three daughters and
one son: Oscar, who is ranching for himself, and who has a dairy of eighteen
cows and is happily married; Mae and Janie, who graduated from Gridley High
School and also Heald’s Business College, Sacramento;
and Ethel, who is the only one born in California, is in the grammar school.
Transcribed by Marie Hassard
29 October 2009.
Source:
"History of Butte County, Cal.," by George C. Mansfield, Pages
1279-1280, Historic
Record Co, Los Angeles, CA, 1918.
© 2009 Marie Hassard.
Golden Nugget Library's
Butte County Biographies