Butte County
Biographies
HENRY WILLIAM THORNE
HENRY WILLIAM THORNE.—The superintendent of the rock-crushing plant at Oroville, for the Natomas Company of California, Henry W. Thorne, was born at Gibson City, Ford County, Ill., September 29, 1879, the son of O. P. and Hannah Thorne, natives of Skane, Sweden. His parents were farmers and migrated to Illinois, locating on a farm in Ford County. In 1885, the family returned to Sweden, where the parents died.
Of their five children Henry W. is the second oldest and the only one in the United States. He was brought up in Illinois until the age of six years, when he accompanied his parents back to Sweden, where he attended the public schools until sixteen years of age, when he determined to return to the land of the Stars and Stripes; so in 1896 he came to Nebraska, where his uncle, Mr. Hembel, was a farmer in Boone County. He worked for his uncle for one year and then began working as a carpenter and millwright, following the building business and doing much work in the line of building grain elevators. In May, 1906, he came to San Francisco, Cal., and, looking around for employment, came to Cordelia and became millwright at the rock-crushing plant of the E. B. & A. L. Stone Company, continuing with them about a year, when he resigned and came to Folsom, where he became millwright for the Natomas Company, with which concern he has been ever since. He assisted in the construction of the Folsom plant as a millwright and continued with the company there for five years. In 1913 he came to Oroville as superintendent of the rock-crushing plant for the same company, remaining until the fall of 1917, when he was transferred to Exchecquer, Cal., as superintendent of the plant at that place, continuing in charge until January, 1918, when he was again transferred back to Oroville to his old position as superintendent of the rock-crushing plant. This plant has a capacity of one thousand tons of crushed rock a day, and handles approximately fifteen hundred tons of material a day, giving employment to about thirty men.
Mr. Thorne was married in Folsom to Miss Ethel A. Pierce, who was born in Minnesota, and they have two sons, Guy and Albert. In his political views Mr. Thorne is a Republican, and in religion is a Lutheran.
Transcribed
by Sharon Walford Yost.
Source: "History of
Butte County, Cal.," by George C. Mansfield, Pages 1132-1133, Historic Record Co, Los Angeles, CA, 1918.
© 2009 Sharon
Walford Yost.
Golden Nugget Library's Butte County Biographies