Sacramento County
Biographies
EDWARD T. HART
EDWARD T. HART.—A rancher long active
in a successful career, and who has earned the comforts and delights of a quiet
and secure retirement, is Edward T. Hart, the once extensive farmer of Mormon
Island, Folsom City. He is the proprietor of a stock-farm embracing eighty
acres there, twenty-four miles east of Sacramento,
where he has resided for thirty-five years. He was born on McDowell Hill,
in Eldorado
County, on February 19, 1853, the
son of Hugo T. Hart, a pioneer of placer mining in the historic year of the
Argonauts, ‘49, and our subject is the only surviving member of that sturdy
family. His father died on McDowell Hill, in 1901, at the age of
seventy-four, while Mrs. Hart survived him eight years, and passed away at the
still riper age of eighty-one.
Edward
Hart attended the Mormon Island
school, and when old enough to do so, took up farming
as a vocation, entering into a partnership, at an early age, with his parents
and helping them to run the home farm. In 1878 he was married at Sudan
Station to Mrs. Ida Knight, the daughter of Cy Schaff, a pioneer who came to Mormon
Island in 1852 and was a popular
hotel-keeper there. This old hotel had really been built in 1850 of
materials brought from the East all the way round Cape Horn, then by boat from San
Francisco to Sacramento, and finally by
freighting teams to Mormon Island. Mrs.
Hart was born in Sacramento in
1842, and from childhood was intimately associated with the growth of that
district. For the past eleven years, the raising of stock and the
maintaining of a first-class dairy have been the forte
of Mr. Hart, and those having most dealings with him know best how well he has
succeeded in his chosen field. This enviable position as an experienced
man of affairs able to attend both of his own and the community’s business has
brought its honors and responsibilities, and for the past twenty-five years Mr.
Hart has been a trustee of Mormon Island
school.
Four
children blessed the union of Mr. And Mrs. Hart. Albert, a rancher and the
right hand man of his father, is an active member of the local farm bureau in Orangevale,
and besides being a very bright progressive young man, is a capable
agriculturist, keeping himself well in touch with the latest movements in the
science of husbandry in the West. Claude is a blacksmith of Yuba
City. Ina has become the wife of Charles
Morrison; and Edna is Mrs. Zack Darrington of Red
Bank. Mrs. Hart has a daughter by a former marriage, Mrs. Sadie Johnson.
Owing
to his long residence and continued activity hereabouts, Edward Hart has no end
of good stories concerning the past. He recalls the early life on Mormon
Island as a good deal different in contrast to present-day conditions, for at
one time public gatherings would be attended by as many as 3,000 people, while
today, in the district so lively in the golden days of yore, only forty-four
persons are registered voters.
Transcribed 4-29-07
Marilyn R. Pankey.
Source: Reed, G.
Walter, History of Sacramento County,
California With Biographical Sketches, Page 721. Historic Record Company, Los Angeles, CA. 1923.
© 2007 Marilyn R. Pankey.