LEWELLYN TOZER

 

 

Lewellyn Tozer, whose death occurred in the City of San Francisco in March, 1908, came to California about the year 1867, after having served as a gallant young soldier of the Union in the Civil war.  He became a substantial business man and honored citizen of the state of his adoption, and his life was so ordered that he at all times commanded the confidence and high regard of his fellow men.   He was born on the home farm of his father, Daniel Tozer, in the State of Maine, and was sixty-six years of age at the time of his death.  He was the oldest in a family of six children, the names of the others being as here noted:  Marcellus, Charlotte (Mrs. W. F. Whittier), Josephine (Mrs. F. N. Woods), Helen and Viola (both deceased).

 

    The subject of this memoir was reared in the sturdy discipline of the New England farm and gained the greater part of his youthful education by attending school at Farmington Hill, Maine.  When the Civil war began he promptly tendered his services in defense of the Union and as a member of a Maine regiment of volunteer artillery (the Fourth Maine Battery) he took part in numerous engagements and lived up fully to the tension of the conflict through which the integrity of the nation was preserved, his continued interest in his old comrades having been manifested in his appreciative affiliation with the Grand Army of the Republic in later years.  After the war Mr. Tozer taught school for a time and as before noted, it was about the year 1867 that he came to California.  In San Francisco he found employment in the establishment of Whittier and Fuller, dealers in paints, oils, etc., and later he became the firm's representative in the city of Sacramento, acquiring a half interest in the branch there where he continued his residence many years.  He was twice elected and served two consecutive terms as a member of the city council of Sacramento, in which he represented the fifth ward, and he not only was chairman of the important finance committee of this municipal body but also was called upon to serve as mayor pro tem., in the absence of the regular incumbent.  He was a progressive and public-spirited citizen, and it was while he was a member of the Sacramento City Council that he fathered the important filtration system which was in after years adopted for the waterworks of the city. In 1897 he was the republican candidate for mayor of Sacramento, but political exigencies compassed his defeat for this office.  In 1902, Mr. Tozer returned to San Francisco and here purchased the wall-paper department of the business of the firm with which he had long been connected.  Under the title of L. Tozer & Son he continued his active association with this substantial and well ordered business enterprise until the time of his death. 

 

    The year 1869 recorded the marriage of Mr. Tozer and Miss Hannah Augusta Whittier, who likewise was born and reared in Maine, and who passed away in 1922, at age of seventy-six years.  Of the two children of this union the elder son, Herbert Otis, died when twenty years of age, and the younger, C. Walter, is engaged in the real estate business in San Francisco.

 

Transcribed by Marilyn R. Pankey.

 

 

Source: "The San Francisco Bay Region" by Bailey Millard Vol. 3 page 114-115. Published by The American Historical Society, Inc. 1924.

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