Sacramento County
Biographies
HENRY SEYMOUR HILL
HENRY SEYMOUR HILL, miller, Elk Grove,
was born in Litchfield County, Connecticut,
September 11, 1825. His father, Samuel Hill, was born near New
Orleans during the war of the Revolution and the
struggle with the British in that locality, his father being a soldier in the
British service at that time. The maiden name of the mother of Mr. H. S.
Hill was Laura Pitcher. Samuel and his family moved to Pennsylvania
in 1828, where he died about 1845; his widow lived until 1852. They had
located in Susquehanna County,
on the line between that and Bradford
County. Mr. Hill, the subject
of this notice, the youngest of five children in the above family, was brought
up in Pennsylvania and lived there until 1851; September 24, that year, in
company with a man named Brown, a young physician just starting out in the
world, he left Bradford County and took passage at New York on the steamer
Brother Jonathan, on the first trip ever made by that
vessel in the California trade. She was afterward lost on the Pacific
coast while running between San Francisco and Oregon. Mr.
Hill landed at Chagres, took a small boat called the Bungo
up that river to Cruces, with twenty-seven others, of whom three were women,
and eighteen of them were from Bradford County,
Pennsylvania.
From Cruces they went to Panama
across the Isthmus. Mr. Hill started with a mule, but shortly afterward
gave it to a sick traveler, and he and Brown footed it the rest of the
way. In a week or ten days he took the old steamer Panama,
one of the first steamers on the coast, for San Francisco,
with 1,200 passengers aboard, when it was registered to carry only 500 or
600. In twenty-one days he landed at the city of the Golden
Gate November 4, 1851. There he waited for other passengers
from Bradford County,
who took the old propeller Monumental City,
and were two weeks behind the other vessel reaching San
Francisco. In the meantime Mr. Hill had been
earning something in the city, and when his friends arrived he was able to help
them pay their passage to the mines, at Columbia Flats, Tuolumne
County, where Mr. Hill and two
others took some claims. On arriving at the mines they waited a month for
water, with which to wash for gold; but Mr. Hill’s patience gave out and he
sold his share in the mines to two others, who remained there and made a
fortune in two months, taking out about $80,000! Mr. Hill came to Sacramento
and contracted with parties to build a mill in Eureka, Yuba
County, and was there until the following July;
then stopping in San Francisco until autumn, when, after
the great fire, he came to Sacramento
again. The next spring he went to the mines and struck some new
discoveries in Placer County,
in a spot near the Bear River called the Long
Ravine. Then he kept boarding-house and provision-store in Eureka,
and also did some mining there. Selling out, he left there in June,
1853. He went to Foster’s Bar, on the Yuba
River, and in the fall to
Marysville. In the spring of 1854 he went to Santa Clara and remained
there about a year; and then to Santa Cruz until 1861, where he had property
and prosecuted the mill wright’s trade; then, from
the autumn of 1861 to 1869 he was engaged in the same business at Virginia City;
was next in Sacramento until 1871; then built a mill at Lakeport, Lake County,
being there about two years, working at different points. In 1874 he came
to Sacramento again, and then to
Red Buff, where he was a member of a stock company who built a mill
there. Mr. Hill constructed the whole building in 1875. In January, 1876,
he bought property in Elk Grove, and in March following his brother and his
family came to this place with him. During the latter year he erected a
small feed-mill, which was run until 1878, when he enlarged it and put in
machinery for making flour. It was rented out two years, ending April,
1880, since which time Mr. Hill has conducted it, in partnership with Louis
Bower, who in fact has been interested in the concern ever since 1878. Mr.
Hill has been a member of the order of Odd Fellows ever since 1848, and now
belongs to Elk Grove Lodge, number 274, and to the Occidental Encampment of
Sacramento, No. 57, and also the Veteran Odd Fellows’ Association of San
Francisco. He was married in Santa Cruz, in 1856, to
Mary Uhden, a native of Ohio,
and they have two children: Eddie and Laura.
Transcribed 9-3-07 Marilyn R. Pankey.
Source: Davis, Hon. Win. J., An Illustrated
History of Sacramento County, California. Pages 626-627.
Lewis Publishing Company. 1890.
© 2007 Marilyn R. Pankey.