Butte County
Biographies
ALBERT LINCOLN THRESHER
ALBERT LINCOLN THRESHER.—Prominent among the scientific ranchers of Butte County who have made a special study of horticulture and have contributed something to the advancement of horticultural conditions in California, and especially equipped in his experimental work through travel which has greatly enlarged his horizon and added to his knowledge of conditions elsewhere, is Albert Lincoln Thresher, the youngest son of Stephen P. and Columbia (Caldwell) Thresher, natives of New Hampshire and Vermont, respectively. His father and mother and a brother came across the great plains in 1852, setting out from Wisconsin, where Stephen Thresher was a foreman machinist and carpenter in the celebrated J. I. Case Machine Works; and when he had safely arrived, Mr. Thresher helped the Plumas County miners by building for them their much-needed flumes. Afterward he took up land three miles southeast of Gridley, acquiring by purchase a squatter’s claim on the Larkin Grant, and he continued to acquire until he had seven hundred acres or more. He raised grain and undertook to do something with the wild cattle running in great numbers at large on his land; but the flood of 1862 and the drought of 1863 and 1864 wiped out the cattle and he had to commence all over again with domestic cattle brought from the East. He died, in 1872, a successful ranchman; and Mrs. Thresher died in 1881. Mr. Thresher had been justice of the peace and also school trustee for years, and was everywhere highly respected.
Five children were born to these worthy pioneer parents, all of them being sons. The eldest was Prescott B., now deceased, who came across the continent with his parents on their maiden trip. The next-born was Columbus W., the well-known ranchman near Gridley. George and Tyler C. are also both dead, and the subject of our sketch was the youngest of all.
Born on his father’s home ranch near Gridley, on March 28, 1861, Albert Lincoln Thresher attended the Manzanita grammar school and afterward rode the range and assisted his father on the farm. In May, 1885, he started farming for himself. At first he farmed a three-hundred-acre ranch in Tehama County. In the spring of 1886, with Daniel Knight, he drove a bunch of horses from the Nez Perces Indian Reservation, in Idaho, over the Lolo trail through the Rocky Mountains, down the Yellowstone, across the Bad Lands, through the Sioux Indian country, to Aberdeen, S. Dak., thence to Glencoe, Minn. After disposing of the horses, he made a visit to the Wisconsin, after which he returned to his ranch. Selling his Tehama ranch, in 1887, he then bought four hundred acres on the river, seven miles above Marysville. This consisted of rich bottom land and he was soon able to raise grain and alfalfa with the most satisfactory results. At the end of three years, he sold it and bought another ranch of two hundred thirty acres near by which he farmed to grain.
Again he sold out and in 1898 bought his present ranch east of Gridley. The place originally consisted of fifty acres; but on the twenty-first birthday of his only son he gave him seven and a quarter acres which he planted to apple orchard, the largest in the district. Mr. Thresher still owns seventy-five acres of the old home ranch, on which he is raising peaches, prunes, plums, and pears. The land there is very rich, and was formerly devoted to vineyards. This, in the early days, was the site of an Indian rancheria of about three hundred Indians. Our subject, then a boy, remembers these distinctly. Mr. Thresher’s home-place is given to orchards of peaches, prunes and pears, which yield abundantly. The home ranch where he lives was formerly the Ledbetter Place, and when he bought his portion, he paid only forty dollars an acre for it, unimproved.
In Gridley, 1888, Mr. Thresher married Mathilda C. Sturm, of Iowa, by whom he had one son and two daughters: Albert Warner, who is a business man of Gridley, who married Irene Nordstrom, and who has one son and a daughter, Grace, who is the wife of Louis Van Ness, a prominent lumber dealer in Atascadero, San Luis Obispo County, and who has two sons and one daughter; Mary L., who is the wife of William Boulware of Gridley, and who has one son. Mr. Thresher’s first wife died while on a visit to her old home in Davenport, Iowa, February 14, 1896. Over three years later, October 11, 1899, he married again, the ceremony being performed in Sacramento, uniting him with Miss Emma A. Sturm, born in Davenport, a sister of his first wife, the daughter of August and Fredericka (Ffoh) Sturm, pioneers of Scott County, Iowa. Her father was a musician and was leader of the Forty-fifth Illinois Regimental Band during the Civil War.
Mr. Thresher took an active part in interesting the people of the vicinity in taking the necessary steps to secure the building of the Butte County Canal now the Sutter-Butte Canal. With his brother, George, he spent two months in securing the necessary ten thousand acres to insure the building of the canal. This has probably done more to enrich the farmers of the district than any other one thing, and has been the means of raising the value of the land, in many instances tenfold. He is a charter member of the California Peach Grower’s Association.
Transcribed
by Sharon Walford Yost.
Source: "History of
Butte County, Cal.," by George C. Mansfield, Pages 1190-1191, Historic Record Co, Los Angeles, CA, 1918.
© 2009 Sharon
Walford Yost.
Golden Nugget Library's Butte County Biographies