Butte County
Biographies
HARRY P. STOW
HARRY P. STOW.--A very successful and
prominent man of affairs in the metropolitan city of San Francisco, who still
has a very warm place in his heart for Butte County, is Harry P. Stow, known to
his wide circle of friends as of agreeable personality, made all the more so
through his gifts as a conversationalist. He is a native son, born in the Bay
city. His father was W. W.
Stow, the well-known pioneer of the early fifties, who came from New
York. He was born at Binghampton,
N. Y., and was educated at Hamilton College,
from which institution have come some of the brainiest sons of the Empire
State; and he finally prepared
himself as a practicing attorney. After having married Ann Eliza Patterson,
also a New Yorker, he came to California in 1852, by way
of the Isthmus of Panama; and two years later his wife, with her first-born, a
son, joined him on the Pacific Coast.
He practiced law for a short while in Pajaro, and
then definitely located in San Francisco,
where he gradually became eminent as a lawyer, of the firm of Patterson,
Wallace and Stow, and also as a
public-spirited citizen. His demise, deeply regretted by all who had come to
know him, occurred in 1895. His estimable wife survived him until November,
1907. Of her eight children, six grew up, and three are now living.
Harry
P. Stow was educated at the George Bates University School in San Francisco,
after which he entered Harvard College, continuing there until his father
purchased the Gold Bank Mine at Forbestown, when, in
September, 1886, he returned to California and assumed the management of the
property. For seventeen years he continued to operate the mine, and so
successfully that in all that time it was not necessary once to shut down. His
father purchased the Gold Bank from the original locator, Archie Nivens of Nevada City;
and Jack Nivens and Mat Waite were prospecting it at
the time. The father was the sole owner until his death, when the family
incorporated it as the Gold Bank Mining Company, with Harry P. Stow as manager.
The
ore of the Gold Bank was quartz, a gold sulphide ore,
and they had a chlorination plant with which to treat the concentrates. They
started with four five-foot Huntington
mills, and eventually built a sixty-stamp mill. When they began mining there,
they found the old gravel pits in which the forty-niner placer miners had
sluiced off the dirt, and at that time a second growth of trees had sprung up
from the old debris, sometimes sixteen inches through. The mine had seven addit tunnels above the collar of the shaft, and an incline
shaft was sunk sixteen hundred feet on the incline. A long cross-cut tunnel,
starting in Forbes Ravine approximately half-way to South Feather River, was
run to connect with the ledge, about twelve hundred feet long, and an upraise
driven to connect with the bottom shaft, which then made the shaft
approximately sixteen hundred feet, as above stated. There were nine levels
running east and west, and a winze of about three hundred feet was sunk below
the level of the cross-cut tunnel. The greatest distance on the pitch of the
vein from the highest point of outcrops to the bottom of the winze was about
two thousand seven hundred feet. The greatest distance on the trend of the vein
from the farthest east face to farthest west face was two thousand feet.
In
the steady and at times spirited operation of the mine, about three thousand
tons were crushed each month with forty stamps, and five thousand tons a month
with sixty stamps. It was the most extensive quartz mine operated in the
county, and employed as many as one hundred fifty men. The power was derived
from water from the Forbestown ditch. The gross
output was approximately one million five hundred thousand dollars, and this
was controlled by the close corporation of the Stow
family. They paid the workmen by check; and as the miners hoarded the vouchers,
the bank balance ranged from two to five hundred thousand dollars. An
illustration of how this resulted is found in an anecdote about two Cornishmen
employed there. They were brothers, and stuck with the mine for three years;
and when they left to return to England,
one had uncancelled checks for seventeen hundred
dollars and the other for over twelve hundred dollars.
The
coming of the Stows to Forbestown brought about important changes. The place had
been a regular forty-niner town, a natural placer ground; and while the placers
in the district were shallow, they were very rich in deposits. All the gold
from the workings in the early days was brought to Forbestown
and sold to storekeepers, and so handled by them; and one merchant alone, Mr.
Gibson, said that he had handled over his little counter three and a half
million dollars of gold dust from Forbestown and
vicinity. Notwithstanding this wealth, the place remained a leisurely going,
out-of-the-world community. When Mr. Stow went to Forbestown
in 1886, the stage made only three trips a week, and it was the only means of
communication. It took Mr. Stow seven years before he could get Wells Fargo and
Company to open an office there, and several years more to get the telephone
line built into town. This was finally accomplished in the most business-like
way. The people subscribed a sum sufficient to induce the company to lead their
wires into the region, and the company in return furnished subscribers with an
amount of coupons equivalent to their subscriptions, and good later for the
payment of their telephone tariffs. These changes are the more interesting when
one considers some of the unique, historic features of the town. The Masonic
lodge at Forbestown is one of the oldest in the
state. When a movement was made to remove the lodge to Challenge Mills, Yuba
County, the old members of the
lodge, though absent from Forbestown for several
decades, returned to have a voice in the matter and voted the proposition down;
and the lodge is still in Forbestown. Its place of
meeting was, and is still, in their own hall, next to
the old rattle-trap, Gibson's store, later Wells Fargo and Company's office.
The post office is peculiarly built--of two-by-six scantlings laid on the flat,
one laid on top of another, with an overlap of one-quarter of an inch, and the
next one back in line with the first, and so on, making little pockets to hold
the plaster, with iron for doors and windows, the object being to make it as
near fireproof as a wooden building could be made. The schoolhouse, on the
hill, was erected back in the fifties by private subscription, and many of its
early teachers were afterward men of prominence in the state.
After
seventeen years' management of the Gold Bank Mine, Mr. Stow closed it down and
made a trip to Alaska, where he was assistant superintendent of the Treadwell
Mine from December, 1904, to September, 1907; and at the end of the three years
he returned to Oroville, where he had business interests as a member of the
firm of Ekman, Stow and Company, druggists, and also
olive oil manufacturers. A couple of years later he sold out his share in the
business and came to Oakland, where he was for three years
superintendent of the quarries of the Leona Chemical Company. Being a
stockholder in the Thomas Day Company, manufacturers of lighting fixtures on Mission
Street, San Francisco, he
next entered actively into the business. For four years he was superintendent
of the factory, and in 1915 he became general manager of the business.
While
at Forbestown, Mr. Stow was married to Kate Matteson,
a native of North San Juan, but who was reared in Nevada
City; and for years the Stow
household has been the center of genuine California
hospitality. He was made a Mason in Gasteneaux Lodge,
No. 124, F. & A. M., at Douglas, Alaska,
and is a member of the Seattle Consistory of the Scottish Rite,
where he is a thirty-second-degree Mason.
Always a stanch Republican, and prominent in its councils, he has
served on Republican county central committees, and been a delegate to
conventions. His interest in party politics, however, has never
prevented from unselfishly and without partisanship working for whatever might
improve the community in which he lived.
Transcribed by Sande Beach.
Source: "History of
Butte County, Cal.," by George C. Mansfield, Pages 721-724, Historic Record Co, Los Angeles, CA, 1918.
© 2008 Sande Beach.
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