Sacramento County
Biographies
WILLIAM
CARROLL
WILLIAM CARROLL, an enterprising and successful farmer of Lee Township, was born in 1833, in Canada East, about forty-five miles from Montreal, in a settlement almost entirely Catholic, known as St. Columban. His parents, William and Catherine (Cunningham) Carroll, were both Irish, the father being a native of Fermanagh, and the mother of Longford. They were married in New York State about 1828, and their oldest child was born there, being about two years old when they settled at St. Columban’s in 1831. They were the parents of ten sons and two daughters, all living in 1889, except one, who died at the age of fourteen. William received the usual education of what was the equivalent of our district schools, but with a certain fee or contribution attachment. At the age of nineteen or twenty he hired out as a steamboat hand, and worked at different lines of work until he was twenty-five. In the fall of 1858 he set out for California, by way of New York and Cape Horn, arriving in San Francisco in March, 1859, after a voyage of 133 days from New York, in the clipper ship Gray Feather. He engaged in the sheep-raising business on Government land, free to all, until he bought a possessory right in 1863, part homestead and part purchased from the railroad, which he increased by further purchase at intervals until he owned 720 acres. About 1881 he sold 320 acres, making his present holding about 400 acres, on which he raises the usual grain crops. He was married in 1878 to Mrs. Lucy (Scanlan) Kavanaugh, a native of Kerry, Ireland. They have no living children, but Mrs. Carroll is the mother, by her previous marriage, of two, a son and a daughter, the latter now being Mrs. Louis K. Callison, of San Jose.
Transcribed by: Jeanne Sturgis Taylor.
Davis, Hon. Win. J., An Illustrated History of
Sacramento County, California. Pages 719-720. Lewis
Publishing Company. 1890.
© 2007 Jeanne Sturgis Taylor.