Butte County
Biographies
CHARLES HENRY RICHARDS
CHARLES HENRY RICHARDS.—We find in
the record of the studious and capable mining engineer, Charles Henry Richards,
experiences correlating those of the new California and reading like history.
Mr. Richards was born at Centralia, Columbia County, Pa., November 23, 1866. His father, Samuel Richards was
born at Cornwall, England, and came to Virginia as a young man, and engaged in
farming, and later became a mining engineer. He married Elizabeth Ann Hoskin, born of English parents, and she is now living in
Pennsylvania, over ninety years old. After their marriage Mr. Richards
enlisted and served through the Civil War as a Union soldier. He organized and
equipped at his own expense, Company A, One
Hundred Twenty-ninth Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, of which he was First
Lieutenant, and then Captain. Following his honorable discharge from the army,
he engaged in mining, soon becoming an expert mining engineer, whose services
were in great demand, and he traveled to every mining country of importance in
the world, and opened up some of the most valuable collieries in Pennsylvania
and in Alabama. He died at the age of seventy-seven. Mr. and Mrs. Richards
were the parents of nine children, four of whom died in infancy. Of the five
who grew up Charles Henry Richards was next to the youngest and is the only one
residing in Northern California.
At the age of fifteen Charles Henry
Richards left high school, then in his second year, and his home at
Minersville, Pa., and resolved to follow the profession of his father, that of
a mining engineer. He was very studious. He spent one year in Fort Worth,
Texas, and then went as a subordinate with the civil engineering corps that
built the narrow gauge railroad from Lordsburg, N. M., to Clifton, Ariz.,
into the copper-mining country. His next move was to New Mexico, where he
engaged in gold and silver quartz mining in partnership with his brother,
Samuel J. Richards, at Kingston, Lake County. He then went to the New
Orleans Exposition for study and observation, and then to his native state, and
was there during the oil excitement at St. Marysville, Pa.
Mr. Richards then came to California and
settled first in Calico, San Bernardino County, then in Kern County; he lived
in Pasadena from 1896 to 1900, coming to Butte County to take charge of the
“See and Jolly” gold mine at Granite Basin. The mine had been worked for
twenty-five years, and Mr. Richards developed it on a larger scale, making
it a successful mine, and it was sold to a Pittsburgh
syndicate at a good advance. Mr. Richards was at Goldfield, Tonopah,
Rawhide and other places, and he has made at least three good-sized fortunes.
In his varied experiences he has slept out of doors, fought Indians, braved the
desert, and defied frost and snow, and is ready and willing and able to do so
again. For four years he was foreman of the repair shops for the Yuba
Consolidated Goldfield Company at Hammonton, Yuba County, a position which he
resigned in order to go to Goldfield, Nev., to develop gold and silver
properties of his own. Mr. Richards has a home place of sixty-one acres
three and one-half miles east of Oroville, on the Quincy road, where he
resides; he is constantly improving the place.
On June 20, 1895, Mr. Richards married
Miss Jessie Arlin Fisher of Pasadena, now a teacher of the Olive district school.
She is a graduate of the Los Angeles Normal School. They have three children:
Robert, a graduate of the State University at Berkeley, who specialized in
irrigation and civil engineering; Charles Scott, who enlisted in the Thirteenth
Cavalry in April, 1917, and is now with the United States Expeditionary Forces
in France; and Luther Arlin, attending high school at
Oroville. Mr. and Mrs. Richards are highly esteemed in their community. He
is a thorough student, and has the naturally scientific mind of his father. He
is optimistic and patriotic.
Transcribed by Marie Hassard
04 November 2009.
Source:
"History of Butte County, Cal.," by George C. Mansfield, Pages
1291-1292, Historic
Record Co, Los Angeles, CA, 1918.
© 2009 Marie Hassard.
Golden Nugget Library's
Butte County Biographies