Sacramento County
Biographies
WILLIAM
ROBINSON GRIMSHAW
WILLIAM ROBINSON GRIMSHAW, deceased, was born in the city of New York, his parents being John and Emma (Robinson) Grimshaw. The father was English, and of a family interested in manufacturing in Manchester. The mother was American for at least five generations, being of the Robinson family of Rhode Island. The father dealt in cotton or cotton goods and traveled much. William R., was taken to England when two years old, remaining three years, and again at the age of six, when he remained five years at school. Losing his father early in life, he was much indebted to Thomas Minturn, an uncle by marriage, for his support and education. On his return from England he was sent to Mobile, Alabama, where he lived four years in some school or college. Again returning to New York, he is known to have spent some time in Burlington, Vermont, and at some point in the interior of the State of New York, and again in New York city —in all six years, for the most part, as is supposed, spent in completing his education. He is also known to have been a drug clerk for a time before he came of age. At the age of twenty-one he “shipped before the mast” on the Isaac Walton, owned wholly or in part by his uncle Minturn, and bound for California. Arriving at Monterey, he shipped on the Anita, a naval tender, which he left in October, 1848, to accept the position of bookkeeper for S. Brannan & Co., at Sutter’s Fort, at a salary of $400 a month. In November 1849, he went into partnership with William Daylor, and kept a store on his ranch on the Cosumnes River. Mr. Daylor died of cholera in 1850, leaving no issue. In April, 1851, Mr. Grimshaw was married to Mrs. Sarah P. (Rhoads) Daylor, the widow of his late partner, to whom she had been married four years before, at the age of seventeen. After some years they lived in Sacramento for a time, where Mr. Grimshaw was a law clerk with Winans & Hyer in 1857. By private study and from such experience of legal business as he had gathered in a law office and his superior general education he was deemed qualified to become a lawyer, and was admitted to the bar in 1868. He, however, quit the practice of law in the spring of 1869, not finding it as congenial as he had anticipated. He was a justice of the peace for fourteen years, and a teacher of the district school for six years, toward the close of his life. In 1876 he made a voyage to China for his health, but with no marked improvement. He died September 14, 1881. Mr. and Mrs. Grimshaw were the parents of twelve children, nine sons and three daughters, of whom seven, with their mother, are now living: William R., born March 31, 1852; Emma G., November 26, 1853, now Mrs. William D. Lawton, of Sacramento; Thomas Minturn, August 15, 1856; George R., October 8, 1858; John Francis, June 1, 1862; Frederick M., May 9, 1866; and Walter S., January 15, 1868. The mother was born in 1830 in Edgar County, Illinois, being a daughter of Thomas and Elizabeth (Foster) Rhoads. She has been a resident of the Cosumnes, with but little interruption, since the arrival in California of her parents, with their fourteen living children and two or three grandchildren, in 1846.
Transcribed by: Jeanne Sturgis Taylor.
Davis, Hon. Win. J., An Illustrated History of
Sacramento County, California. Page 616. Lewis
Publishing Company. 1890.
© 2007 Jeanne Sturgis Taylor.