Calaveras
County
Biographies
SAMUEL S. MOSER
The early ‘60s saw the advent in
California of a class of men who have exerted a marked influence on the
development of the state since that time and have come to the front prominently
in mining, in general business or in a profession.
Samuel S. Moser, of Mokelumne Hill,
Calaveras County, is one of the well known Californians who came to the state
in 1861, and in his forty years’ residence here he has made an enviable record
for progress and integrity and all those other qualities which enter into the
mental constitution of the successful businessman and the useful citizen.
Samuel S. Moser is descended from
German and English ancestors who settled in America before the Revolutionary
War. Daniel Moser, his father, was born
in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, in 1793, and married Susan Everett, who was
born in that county in 1799, a member of the well known family of Everett,
which produced Hon. Edward Everett, the great American statesman and orator.
After his marriage he removed to Trumbull County, Ohio, where he became a
farmer and died at the advanced age of eighty-one years and where his wife died
at the age of fifty-seven. In religious
faith they were Lutherans and in politics Mr. Moser was at first a Whig and
afterward a Republican. They had nine
children and three of their sons fought in the Civil War for the preservation
of the Union.
Samuel S. Moser was born in Liberty
Township, Trumbull County, Ohio, December 9, 1837, and was educated there and
lived there until 1861, when in his twenty-fourth year, he sailed from New York
for Aspinwall on the Golden Age up along the Pacific coast to San Francisco,
where he arrived April 21, without means but with an ambition to “get on in the
world.” He went at once to Mokelumne
Hill, and making his headquarters there, mined and taught school at different
places in Calaveras and Amador counties.
He prospered and became the owner of the Bonanza mine, which he opened
and in which he employed from eight to sixteen men until the passage of the law
prohibiting hydraulic mining, and out of which he had taken by that time one
hundred thousand dollars. Meantime he
had come into possession of a tailings claim, which yielded him thirty thousand
dollars, and later he prospected a quartz ledge, which is bonded for fifty
thousand dollars.
In politics Mr. Moser is a
Republican and he has been a member of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows for
forty years, and has passed all the chairs in its different branches and is at
present serving as the secretary in the subordinate and encampment
branches. In 1868 he married Miss Almena
Maria Harrington, a native of Boston, Massachusetts, who came to California, October,
1859, where her father, George F. Harrington, had been a pioneer in 1851. Mrs. and Mrs. Moser have three daughters,
named as follows in the order of their nativity: Eugenie C., Florence M. and Mamie E. Eugenie C. married E. C. Fisher, the express
agent at Merced, Merced County, California, and a prominent citizen of that
town. Florence M. and Mamie E. are
popular and successful schoolteachers.
The several members of the family are communicants of the Protestant
Episcopal Church. The family residence
at Mokelumne Hill is one of the most homelike and hospitable in the town and
the Moser’s are held in high esteem by all who know them.
Transcribed by
Gerald Iaquinta.
Source:
“A Volume of Memoirs and Genealogy of Representative Citizens of Northern
California”, Pages 418-419. Chicago Standard Genealogical Publishing Co. 1901.
© 2010
Gerald Iaquinta.
Golden Nugget Library's Calaveras County Biographies