CHARLES WEBSTER DOE

 

Charles Webster Doe has been a resident of San Francisco for nearly half a century and has been long and prominently identified with the lumber industry and allied lines of business enterprise, in which connection he is now the executive head of the California Door Company, an important corporation that has wide and varied interests, with extensive sawmills, logging camps, timber lands and factories.  The planing mill and door factory of the concern are established at Oakland, and the principal sawmill is in Diamond Springs, Eldorado County.

 

     Mr. Doe is a scion of sterling New England Colonial ancestry and claims the old Pine Tree State as the place of his nativity.  The ancestral record of Charles W. Doe shows that Nicholas Doe was probably the son of Henry Doe, who came to America in April, 1637, with his wife and four children from Ormsby, County of Norfolk, England, and settled at Oyster River, New Hampshire.  He was born at Parsonsfield, Maine, on the 25th of April, 1855, and is a son of Alvah and Martha (Leavitt) Doe, he being the youngest in a family of seven sons.  The father was a substantial farmer in Maine, where he died in the year 1885, and the widowed mother passed to the life eternal in the year 1870.

 

     The public schools of his native place afforded Charles W. Doe his early education, which was advanced by his attending high school in the City of Boston, Massachusetts.  He was twenty-two years of age when, in 1877, he came to San Francisco and associated himself with the wholesale lumber business of B. & J. S. Doe & Company.  With the passing years he became one of the principals, and leading executives of this important industrial corporation, the title of which was changed to its present form, the California Door Company about the year 1900.  Mr. Doe has long been one of the vigorous and resourceful business men of the state of his adoption and has standing as one of the honored and influential citizens of San Francisco.

 

     On the 13th of January, 1885, was solemnized the marriage of Mr. Doe to Miss Laura Mitchell, who was born and reared in San Francisco.  Both sons, Alvah and Charles, Jr., are graduates of Stanford.  Charles is an athlete and played on the varsity team, being known as the champion half-back on the Pacific Coast.  In 1920 he was chosen to represent America in the Olympian games at Antwerp, Belgium, and again in 1924 was chosen as one of the American representatives at the meet in Paris.  During the war he drove an ambulance for six months at the front in Italy and was the recipient of many decorations.  He is a Mason.  Unmarried.  Alvah is married and has two children, Laura and Elizabeth; Laura (Mrs. Pettigrew) has one girl, Nancy; Aileen (Mrs. Johnson) has one girl, Aileen; Marian (Mrs. Shores) has two sons, Charles Doe and Terrell Shores.  Of the five children of this union the eldest is Alvah Bartlett, who is actively identified with the business of the California Door Company; Laura is the wife of P. L. Pettigrew of San Francisco; Aileen likewise resides in this city, she being the widow of W. P. Johnson; Marian is the wife of E. Shores of San Francisco; and Charles Webster, Jr., is actively associated with the California Door Company.  In connection with business affairs and loyal and progressive citizenship the two sons are well upholding the prestige of the family name.

 

Transcribed: Marilyn R. Pankey  5-22-04.