Los Angeles County
Biographies
BENJAMIN
FRANKLIN GRAHAM
GRAHAM, BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, President, Graham Farm Lands Company, Los Angeles, California, was born in Coryell County, Texas, Oct. 21, 1868, the son of Otis Denton Graham and Martha (Thornton) Graham. Of Scotch-English ancestry, he has carried through life the qualities of shrewdness, integrity and affability presumed to inhere in that strong combination. Mr. Graham was married in 1887 and later divorced. He has three children, Nettie May, Bertha and Cecil Franklin Graham.
Mr. Graham began at an early age to fight the battles of life and has been at it ever since. He has been successful in accumulating three fortunes. His education was received at intervals from the district school, and then not there attending, he worked on his father’s farm. At the age of eighteen he had accumulated enough capital through his own energy, to lease a tract of farming land. This same farm Mr. Graham later bought with money accumulated as a result of his intelligent industry.
In 1891, on account of ill health, he sold his farm and moved to New Mexico, where he established a mercantile store at Carlsbad and later, one at Roswell. During the few years that Mr. Graham was in New Mexico outside activities, such as real estate and mining, claimed his attention a good deal of the time. He later sold his interests in New Mexico and in 1896 moved to Arizona, where he started a mercantile store at Bisbee. He also engaged in real estate there and operated mining properties in that vicinity. Soon he became a general broker and after two years gave up the mercantile business in order to devote his time exclusively to the promotion and development of new mining properties. In 1903 his operations spread to Douglas, Arizona, and thence in different parts of that State and in Old Mexico.
Three years later Mr. Graham, who had come into possession of properties representing nearly three million dollars, encountered a heavy loss.
After this experience he went to Los Angeles, California, where he remained but a short time before securing an option on a valuable mine in British Columbia, but after going to the northern fields he saw greater possibilities in the timber industry. He was in the territory hardly thirty days before he had secured a tract of twenty thousand acres of timber. This he sold in a very short time, netting for himself a very handsome profit. In October of the same year he secured 100,000 acres of timber located on what is now known as Graham Island, and immediately organized the Graham Island Lumber Company, a company of which he is now the sole owner. He has since sold all of the timber on Graham Island, and has disposed of a large part of other timber holdings which he had accumulated. Mr. Graham met with phenomenal success in his timber deals during that year, with the result that he switched from mining to timber and real estate operations. By 1910 he had secured large land holdings in California and Oregon, and also a sixty-eight thousand-acre plantation in Mexico, part of which is in coffee and containing 600,000 trees. Mr. Graham soon became one of the largest land operators on the Pacific Coast.
From 1910 until 1912 he spent the time in looking after his properties, and investigating properties offered in large tracts in Southern California suitable for sub-division purposes on a large scale. Mr. Graham was successful in finding, twenty miles west of the city of Fresno, seventy-two thousand acres known as the J. G. James ranch. After spending three months bringing this deal to a close it was consummated for a sum stated to aggregate three million dollars. He closed the deal July 24th, 1912, and this tract constitutes one of the largest, owned and controlled by one man, in the State of California.
Mr. Graham began at once with the development of this vast tract of land by organizing the Graham Farm Lands Company. He is the President and General Manager of the company and is also the managing director of all its operations. He has turned over to the company the entire seventy-two thousand acres with its present town-site of Tranquility and a new one to be named Graham.
Graham is to be the principal town of Graham Ranch and is located in the exact center of the property and on the line of the Southern Pacific Railroad. The country surrounding Graham is being laid out in farms of all sizes, irrigation ditches and roads are being built and the water supply put in shape to immediately take care of the land. The future of the town is practically assured by the improvements being installed and fertility of the soil of the vast farming country tributary.
Mr. Graham is now devoting his entire time to carrying out his idea of making the Graham Ranch the most successful farming community in the West. He is laying it out in small farms of from two acres up, thus making for the man with small means a place which will yield him returns, acre for acre, equal to those earned by the large farm owners.
Mr. Graham is a member of the Jonathan Club of Los Angeles, of the Los Angeles Athletic Club, of the Southern Club of Chicago, of the Glenn Oak Country Club of Chicago, of the Chicago Athletic Club, and of the Chamber of Commerce of Chicago and also the Chamber of Commerce of Los Angeles.
Transcribed 7-10-10
Marilyn R. Pankey.
Source: Press
Reference Library, Western Edition Notables of the West, Vol. I, Page 471, International News Service, New York, Chicago, San
Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Atlanta.
1913.
© 2010 Marilyn R. Pankey.
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