Butte County
Biographies
JOHN WATKINS
JOHN WATKINS.--John Watkins is an exemplification of what thrift, industry, perseverance, and indomitable energy can accomplish. He was born in Monmouthshire, England, September 19, 1848, a son of Thomas Watkins, who was a millwright and engineer. John Watkins early experienced the cares of life that ordinarily are reserved for those of more mature years. His schooling was limited, for as a lad of ten and a half years of age he left home to earn his board and clothes. At the age of seventeen he worked on the London and Northwestern Railroad as wiper, for the small remuneration of fifty cents a day, boarding and clothing himself, and by faithful attention to his duties he rose to the position of foreman, and finally to the position of relieving locomotive engineer.
Crossing the Atlantic in the spring of 1870 as a steerage passenger, Mr. Watkins settled in Ontario, Canada, working six months on a farm, for which he received sixty dollars. He afterward went to New London, Canada, where he got work running a stationary engine, and soon after went into the timber country, working as a stationary engineer. He started and helped to build several of the first portable threshing engines in Perth County, and remained in that section of the country for eight years, after which he removed to Winnipeg, then old Fort Garry, Canada.
While living in Canada, Mr. Watkins was married to Miss Harriet Davis, and two children were born to them before they left Ontario for Manitoba, in 1878. For two seasons he threshed in Manitoba with horse power, then induced his employers to get a portable steam engine for threshing; he ran this engine for many years. Finding the climate of Canada too cold for his liking, relatives living at Palermo, Butte County, Cal., induced him to try his fortune in a milder climate, and disposing of his farm in Manitoba he came to Palermo, Butte County, during the holiday season, remaining there for four months. In May, 1890, he purchased his present place of fifty acres near Wyandotte. In 1893 his wife died, the mother of nine children, four of whom died in infancy. The five remaining children are: Mary Anna, who is living at home; Alice Cecelia, a trained nurse, now living at home; Thomas William, who is a horticulturist at Wyandotte; Charles R., who resides at Alameda, Cal., and is the owner of twenty thousand acres of land on the Isthmus of Panama; and Annie, who lives at home.
Mr. Watkins remains a widower, his daughters keeping house for him in his beautiful, commodious country residence near Wyandotte. Although among the later comers in the vicinity of Wyandotte, he has succeeded beyond the most sanguine expectations as a horticulturist. The improvements on his place are of a substantial and modern character, and the beautiful yards, flowers, fruit trees, etc., all testify to painstaking care as well as the abundance of the water supply. Mr. Watkins is highly respected by his neighbors.
Transcribed
by Sharon Walford Yost.
Source: "History of
Butte County, Cal.," by George C. Mansfield, Pages 1321-1322, Historic Record Co, Los Angeles, CA, 1918.
© 2009 Sharon
Walford Yost.
Golden Nugget Library's Butte County Biographies