S.B. SMITH

     S. B. Smith, public administrator, now residing in Sacramento, is one of the worthy citizens that England has furnished to the new world, his birth occurring in Somersetshire on the 29th of March, 1835.  His father, Samuel Smith, a native of England, was a hat manufacturer in the country of his nativity, and after coming to the United States, engaged in business.  He died in Beloit, Wisconsin, at the age of seventy, and his wife, who bore the maiden name of Mary Ann Jeffries, and who also was born in England, died in Beloit, at the age of seventy-two years.

     S. B. Smith spent his early childhood in the place of his nativity, and there worked in the hat factory, which was owned by his grandfather and of which his father was the foreman.  In 1851 he crossed the broad Atlantic to the new world, and took up his abode in Beloit, Wisconsin, where he partially learned the patternmaker's trade.  Subsequently he removed to Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and in 1856 became a bookkeeper for a lumber firm at that place.  Four years later he left the Mississippi valley for the Pacific coast.  Journeying westward to Nevada City, he secured employment there as a ditch agent, and in the spring of 1862 he continued on his way to the Salmon river, in Siskiyou county, California.  The year 1863 witnessed his arrival in San Francisco, where he became the foreman of the Street Railroad Company.  He entered the employment of that corporation in a very humble capacity, but his marked ability won him rapid advancement.  Subsequently he went to Fort Point, as the foreman of the labor gang of the United States engineering department, and in 1869 became a resident of Sacramento, where he opened a store known as the Chicago C. O. D. Auction House, that he successfully conducted until 1876, when he sold out and went east, and in October of the same year returned to Sacramento and purchased a half interest in an auction house, with which he remained for ten years.  In the fall of 1886 he was elected public administrator, on the Republican ticket, for a term of two years, and has ever since been engaged in the settlement of estates and other business of similar character by appointment of the judges of the superior court, and in 1897 was re-elected to the office of public administrator for the full term of four years.  He has probably handled more estates than any other man in the country, and his reputation for honesty and fidelity is irreproachable.

      On the 3rd of January, 1856, in Beloit, Wisconsin, was celebrated the marriage of Mr. Smith and Miss Helen Mar Gates, a native of New York, who died at Sacramento, at the age of sixty years.  She was the mother of six children, four of whom are yet living, namely: Mrs. F. I. Whitney, who has one child; Mrs. L. E. Thorp, who also has one child; Dottie, at home; and Samuel A.

      For forty-two years Mr. Smith has been a member of the Odd Fellows order and has passed all the chairs in the grand and subordinate lodge and encampment.  In 1856 he joined the new Republican party, which took an advanced stand in favor of many political reforms and in opposition to the further extension of slavery.  He has since been identified with that party, believing it to contain the best elements of good government.  His long residence in Sacramento has made him widely known, and throughout his honorable business career he has won the confidence and good will of his fellow townsmen in an unqualified degree.