San Francisco County
HENRY MILLER
MILLER,
HENRY,
His
father was a dealer in cattle, and his forefathers on the maternal side were
vintners. He reached California in the
year 1849, first settling in San Francisco, where in the year 1860 he was
married to Miss Sarah Wilmot Sheldon, the niece of his first wife,
deceased. The surviving child of this
marriage is Mrs. J. Leroy Nickel, born Nellie Sarah Miller.
From
his seventh to his fourteenth year he attended school, but from the age of
eight earned his own living, his assistance to his father offsetting the cost
of his maintenance. At school he was
noted for his aptitude for figures, his excellent memory and his impatience of
control.
His
strong commercial traits, which he later developed to a high degree of
efficiency, were evinced at a very early age.
At twelve he was in the habit of buying cattle, sheep and goats, generally at a bargain, and driving them to his father’s
packing house. But chafing under
parental training and not liking the prospect of the long apprenticeship
necessary, nor the emoluments of ten Prussian dollars for his first year’s
work, he soon after removed to Holland, thence to England, whence in 1847 he
came to New York, in every instance changing his abode solely to better his
condition.
After
working in New York, first as a gardener for four dollars a month, and then as
assistant to a pork butcher for eight dollars per thirty days of sixteen hours
a day he saved enough money to pay his passage to San Francisco, which he
reached in ’49, with six dollars in his pocket.
Having
formed the habit of reliance on his own judgment he had no misgivings of the
future. He first engaged himself to a
Frenchman to butcher sheep, at the head of Dupont street,
now Grant avenue, and worked for him two months, for small wages, doing his own
cooking and economizing in every way possible.
After the fire of June, 1851, he leased a lot of Jackson street, for $150 cash, erected a one-story building and set
up shop as a retail butcher, a business in which he soon became a wholesale
dealer. In 1853 he bought and delivered
in San Francisco the first herd of cattle ever driven into a San Francisco
market. Four years later he purchased,
with Mr. Charles Lux, sixteen hundred head of
The
beginning of Mr. Miller’s vast investments in country lands was the purchase,
on his private account, of the
Miller
& Lux gradually increased their holdings until
they covered 750,000 acres in eleven different counties of
Among
Mr. Miller’s other notable achievements was his organization of the San Joaquin
and King’s
He is
known also for his large charities, and many recipients thereof are indebted to
him for their support and education in their early years.
Transcribed by Donna L. Becker
Source: Press Reference Library, Western
Edition Notables of the West, Vol. I, page 45, International News Service,
New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Atlanta. 1913.
© 2006 Donna L.
Becker.