Santa Clara County
Biographies
GEORGE J. CAREY
What is known as the Elite, a meat market catering to the best people of Palo Alto since its establishment in 1896, is owned and managed by a practical stockman named George J. Carey, a typical Irish-American of the whole-souled and energetic sort. Mr. Carey was born on a small farm in County Limerick, Ireland, April 26, 1864, and had it not been for the energy and ambition of his father, Patrick might never have left his beautiful but heavily taxed land. Patrick Carey started out in life with average endowments, and as a young man married Amelia Scott, a native also of County Limerick. When his son George was ten years old, in 1874, he came to New York, and from there to San Francisco, engaged in a draying business for a couple of years under the firm name of the P. Carey Truck Company. He then moved to near Mount Hamilton, Calaveras county, where he began to raise stock on a small scale, but increased his business with great rapidity, and finally had a range of ten thousand acres, and eight thousand head of cattle. In 1888 he started a retail meat market on the corner of First and St. John streets, San Jose, at the same time establishing three of his sons in a wholesale butchering business in the same town. For several years he has lived retired in San Jose, where he has a pleasant home, and a competence far exceeding his earlier expectations.
The third of six sons and two daughters, George J. Carey received a practical common school education, at the same time gaining a thorough knowledge of stock under his father’s instruction. He became interested in the business in San Jose in 1888, made money rapidly, and in 1896 bought his present shop at Palo Alto, in connection with the management of which he continues to raise stock. He has a first-class meat market, clean and attractive, and sells only the best products to be found in his line. He does his own slaughtering and curing, and during the course of a year disposes of many hundreds of head of beef, sheep, calves and pigs. Mr. Carey established a home of his own in San Francisco, where he married Lucy Jane Twohig, a native daughter of San Jose, and has a family of two sons and one daughter, Evelyn, George and Clarence. Mr. Carey is a wide-awake and enterprising citizen, a believer in schools and humane institutions, and thoroughly in touch with the general progress of his adopted town. He is a Democrat in politics, and in religion finds a home in the Catholic Church.
Transcribed
Joyce Rugeroni.
Source: History
of the State of California & Biographical Record of Coast Counties,
California by Prof. J. M. Guinn, A. M., Pages 620-623.
The Chapman Publishing Co., Chicago, 1904.
© 2015 Joyce Rugeroni.