ABRAHAM C. BIRD

Los Angeles County

Biographies

ABRAHAM C. BIRD

BIRD, ABRAHAM C., Transportation Service (retired), Compton, California, born in Pike County, Illinois, March 4, 1843. He is the son of the Rev. William H. Bird and Evelyn Bird. In 1868 he married Sarah E. Lippincott at Pana, Illinois. There are five surviving children of his marriage, three of whom are married: Mrs. Alberta Bird Childs, Mrs. Martha B. Olmstead, Mrs. Evelyn B. Huston, Kathryn Bird and William H. Bird.

Mr. Bird attended the public school and academy in Illinois. At the time President Lincoln issued his call for 75,000 volunteers in the spring of 1861, Mr. Bird, like many other young men of that period, left school and entered the army as a private. He enlisted in the Twenty-second Illinois Infantry. With his regiment he served one year and a half and resigned by permission in order to enlist for three years in Troop K, Fourth United States Cavalry. He was a soldier of the Union four years and eight months; during that long period he fought in many of the deadly battles of the Civil War, and remained in the service until after Lee had surrendered at Appomattox and the last gun had been fired.

Mr. Bird was mustered out of the service November 28, 1865. He was one of the lucky ones to get early employment after returning from the war, and, being determined to succeed, he accepted the first employment that seemed to offer future success. He went to work as night watchman for the St. Louis, Alton and Terre Haute Railroad. He was soon promoted to the position of station clerk. Within a few years he was made general clerk in the freight department of the general office in St. Louis. In the early seventies he resigned that position to become chief clerk of the freight department of the St. Louis, Kansas City and Northern Railroad Company. Within two years he was promoted to the general freight agency of that company.

On December 31, 1882, he resigned to take a similar position on the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad, on which road he held several positions, that of freight traffic manager, general traffic manager and third vice president in charge of traffic. He remained with that company continuously for for (sic) more than twenty-one years. His experience was invaluable to him in many ways, and when he retired in the spring of 1903 it was to accept a somewhat similar offer for the Gould system of roads, being vice president of each company and traffic director of all. Headquarters were in Chicago. Capability and knowledge of railroad traffic and general affairs placed him prominently among the men of the Gould system.

His long years of constant work in the service of the Middle West railroad brought about a physical collapse, which induced him to withdraw from service in September, 1906. After a long term in the hospital in Denver, and later in a sanitarium at Lamanda Park, California, he retired to a little ranch which he had owned many years, at Compton, California. He takes as much interest in overlooking his affairs now as he took in former years in keeping the trains well filled, and with a great deal more comfort.

Mr. Bird has always been an active lodge man. He is a thirty-second degree Mason, a member of the California Club in Los Angeles; he is president of the Compton Chamber of Commerce and is a member of the Board of City Trustees.

Transcribed 8-19-08 Marilyn R. Pankey.

Source: Press Reference Library, Western Edition Notables of the West, Vol. I, Page 124, International News Service, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Atlanta. 1913.

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