San Francisco County

Biographies

 

GEORGE AIKEN BATCHELDER

 

      BATCHELDER, GEORGE AIKEN, Vice President E. H. Rollins & Sons, Bonds, San Francisco, California, was born in that city April 13, 1860, the son of Joseph Moody Batchelder and Elizabeth (Aiken) Batchelder. He married Mary Whittemore Kittredge, daughter of Jonathan Kittredge, a California pioneer, in San Francisco, March 19, 1885, and two children were born to them, Doris Elizabeth (Mrs. De Lancy Lewis) and Kittredge Batchelder.

Mr. Batchelder comes in direct descent through eight generations from the Reverend Stephen Batchiler of Hampshire, England, who landed in Boston from the “William and Francis” June, 1632.

Oliver Wendell Holmes speaks of the Reverend Stephen as “that terrible old sinner and ancestor of great men.” There has been some controversy as to the fitness of the first distinction, but of the second there can be no doubt. Among his well-known descendants are Daniel Webster, orator; John Greenleaf Whittier, poet; General Benjamin F. Butler, soldier and lawyer, Wm. Pitt Fessenden, statement; Caleb Cushing, diplomat; General R. N. Batchelder, Grant’s Chief Quartermaster of the Army of the Potomac, and many others of lesser note. George Aiken inherited his wanderlust from the Reverend Stephen, who took his B. A. at St. John’s College, Oxford, in 1586, afterwards lived in Holland and England, and sailed for America in 1632, after receiving from Charles I a grant of arms, notable as one of the few given for services performed in America—“Vert, a plow in fess; in base the sun rising, Or.” He returned to England, dying in 1660, in the one hundredth year of his age.

George A. Batchelder’s mother’s family came from Londonderry, in the north of Ireland, in 1660. His forbears proved their patriotism in the Colonial, the Revolutionary and the Civil wars.

Joseph M. Batchelder reached California in 1850, but went to China in the sixties and died of sunstroke at Miyanosta, Japan, in 1893. He raised the sunken steamship Ajax, which had blocked the river at Shanghai; built the first oceangoing steamship constructed in China, the Yangtzi, and was shipowner, transporting the troops of the Mikado in the war with the Tycoon in 1869.

Mr. Batchelder’s education has been varied and somewhat cosmopolitan. In 1866-67 he attended a private school in Shanghai, China; in 1868 a public school in New Hampshire; the Mount Pleasant Academy, Amherst, Massachusetts, 1869-70; Allen’s English and classical School, West Newton, Massachusetts, 1871-73; the Japanese Government Business School and the University of Tokio 1874-79, and at the Columbia Law School, Washington, D. C., in 1882-83. This extensive schooling was supplemented by traveling when pirates were afloat and traveling was not merely tripping in express trains and floating hotels, all of which combined to broaden his viewpoints. A three months’ voyage to Shanghai, via Honolulu and Foochow, on the barque Valetta, Captain Cavanaugh, in 1866; a cruise in a private yacht through the Inland Sea of Japan, in 1867, while the Tycoon still reigned; a return to San Francisco in March, 1868, on the China, Captain Cobb, with Anson Burlingame’s first Chinese Embassy; back to Massachusetts via Panama in the same year, thence to Japan again in 1873 on the America, Captain Freeman, and from 1873 to 1880 traveling, attending school in Tokio and acting as Assistant Secretary at the United States Legation, form a kaleidoscopic record that suggests a course of moving-picture shows. An official touch is added by the fact that the American Government rented, for ten years, as its Legation in Japan, the residence of Mr. Batchelder’s father.

The roving spirit again seized Mr. Batchelder in 1897 and sent him to Europe in that year; again, in 1902, to the South Seas, and Tahiti in 1904, and around the world in 1907-08.

Mr. Batchelder’s active business life began in 1880, when he entered the Quartermaster’s Depot, U. S. A., in San Francisco, and rose in two years to the post of chief clerk of the depot. From 1882 to 1883 he was a clerk in the War Department at Washington, and in October of the latter year he became treasurer of the Dakota Investment Company at Grand Forks in the Red River Valley of the then Territory of Dakota.

In 1885 he became an officer of the corporation of E. H. Rollins & Sons as Western manager, and in 1892 went to Denver, Colorado, to take charge of its business there. Two years later, in 1894, he opened the San Francisco branch of the house, which thereby became the pioneer bond house of the Pacific Coast. Since that date he has placed more than thirty millions of outside capital in California municipalities and corporations.

In 1894 Mr. Batchelder introduced on this Coast the business of dealing solely in municipal and corporation bonds. The San Francisco office force of E. H. Rollins & Sons consisted of a bookkeeper and a stenographer, with a local business of perhaps $500,000 annual volume. Today the establishment embraces twenty-six, with a volume of some $11,000,000 annually. It was not until 1905 that the second bond house was established in San Francisco, since which time some half a dozen other houses have been added.

Mr. Batchelder has been a director of numerous corporations in various States, and among these his directorship of the Bay Counties Power Company, which broke all previous records for long-distance transmission of electric power, and that of the Western Pacific Railway, the first railroad to break into California against the will of the Southern Pacific, are those in which he took greatest pride, officially speaking.

After the Continental rather than the American custom, he retired from active business at the age of 50. He is now, he says, “taking life easy after the English and Japanese modes,” enjoying his home and giving as much time as he can spare therefrom to certain necessary business interests and to his clubs and societies. Of the latter he has a varied assortment. Among them: The Society of Colonial Wars, D.C., the Bohemian Club, the Pacific Union Club, the Military Order of the Loyal Legion, California Commandery, and the Menlo Country Club.

Transcribed 11-29-06 Marilyn R. Pankey.

Source: Press Reference Library, Western Edition Notables of the West, Vol. I,  Page 163, International News Service, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Atlanta.  1913.

© 2006 Marilyn R. Pankey.

 

 

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