Wilfred Wesley WIGGINS

 

Wilfred Wesley WIGGINS.  Among the men of great business significance at San Francisco, for many years in the city’s earlier history, was the late Wilfred Wesley WIGGINS, who was long identified with important commercial enterprises, a number of these developing under this fostering care, and in the growth of others his name is associated with other notable western pioneers.

 

Wilfred Wesley WIGGINS was a direct descendant of English colonists who had come to Pennsylvania with William PENN in 1682, of the same religious faith, and devoted to the great founder until the close of his life.  Others to whom he had been a benefactor repudiated him and the Quaker faith.  For generations, however, the WIGGINS family prospered and grew in numbers, and throughout the rich valley of Chester County many acres of fine farming land belonged to them.  It was on one of these farms that Wilfred Wesley WIGGINS was born in the early ‘30s, and his father’s circumstances were such that a college education could easily be afforded the youth as he grew to manhood.  After completing a course in Dickinson College, at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, he decided to seek fortune for himself, turning naturally to the great West that was being exploited for its unheard of opportunities at that time.

 

Unless the long and weary trail was followed across the plains travelers to the Pacific Coast in 1854 journeyed by water, and Mr.  WIGGINS, taking ship at Philadelphia in 1853, reached the harbor of San Francisco by way of the Isthmus of Panama, in January 1854.  In the cosmopolitan population he found himself a student of law in the office of the later distinguished Judge CROCKETT of the firm of CROCKETT and CRITTENDEN.  In the meanwhile he served as a notary public, Governor WELLER appointing him to this office in 1859 and Governor Stanford later reaffirming it.

 

In 1861, Mr. WIGGINS was admitted to practice in the Supreme Court of California, and during the next decade he was identified with much of the important litigation of the city, but gradually, as other interests claimed his time and attention, he withdrew more and more from the law, although his profound knowledge of his profession gave additional value to his services in other fields.  In 1866 Mr. WIGGINS accepted the secretaryship of the National Insurance Company, then newly organized, and some years later became associated with W. C. RALSTON in the Bank of California.  An important and useful period of his life was the twenty years during which he was connected with the official management of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, a connection in which he took great pride and from which he only retired some two years before his death when physical infirmity fell upon him.

 

In 1858, Mr. WIGGINS married Miss Caroline FINDLA, who was a niece of James FINDLA, a well known pioneer of 1847.  The celebration of this wedding was an advent of social importance, being the first in what became the fashionable section of the city known as South Park.  One son and three daughters were born to Mr. and Mrs. WIGGINS, all of whom are living either in San Francisco or Bay Cities.

 

Mr. WIGGINS was not only a successful professional and business man, but had other aims.  He was a patron of the arts, an encourager of literary efforts and a friend of educational progress along every line.  For three terms he was treasurer of the Mercantile Library, was a life member of the San Francisco Art Association and was a member of several of the old and conservative clubs. Mr. WIGGINS’ death occurred at San Francisco on September 6, 1900, from a stroke of apoplexy, and his burial was in Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland, California.