San
Joaquin County
Biographies
MELBOURNE E. ANGIER
A splendid example of what an
industrious, enterprising and optimistic man may accomplish, with the
cooperation of his gifted wife, is afforded in the sterling lives and
substantial accomplishments of Mr. and Mrs. Melbourne E. Angier, whose handsome
home place, about four miles southeast of Lodi, is one of the famous showplaces
of the San Joaquin Valley. Mr. Angier
was born at Troy, Orleans County, Vermont, on March 1, 1863, the son of Silas
and Alvira (Conner) Angier, both natives of Connecticut; and he grew up with
one brother, Oscar, and a sister, Alberta.
Up to his thirteenth year, he attended school six months in the year,
and after that three months a year, until he was seventeen, living at home on
his father’s farm of 100 acres in Vermont.
In March, 1884, he left home for
far-off California, but first went to British Columbia, where he worked in a
saw-mill for a season. He then came to
San Francisco, and from there he went into the foothills, where he chopped
wood, for firing the locomotives on the Placerville branch. He then drove a scraper team on Andros
Island, and in February, 1885, he started working for C. W. Norton on his ranch
adjoining the place he now owns. He labored
there until 1890, and then rented forty acres of land from Judge Norton; the
tract being vineyard, which he helped set out in 1888,
and was one of the first commercial vineyards of this locality.
The first ranch Mr. Angier bought
was comprised of twenty acres, in the Live Oaks school
district of San Joaquin County, open land, which he commenced to improve. He added to his holdings from time to time,
until now he owns about 530 acres of the finest land in San Joaquin County. This includes 140 acres between Manteca and
Ripon, in which he has a valuable equity.
That is one of the finest vineyards for bearing Tokay grapes, and is
amply supplied with water from the South San Joaquin Irrigation district ditch. The balance, 390 acres, is in the Live Oak section,
280 acres still unimproved open land. He
has 160 acres planted to shipping plums of different varieties, forty acres in
Alicante Bouchet.
He has on his home ranch two pumping plants, and he cultivates his ranch
with both tractor and horsepower. He is
a member of the Masonic Lodge of Lodi, and belongs to the Royal Arch Chapter
and Commandery at Stockton, the Ben Ali Temple at San Francisco, Sacramento,
and Stockton Lodge of Elks. In national
politics he is a Republican.
At Lodi, on August 8, 1901, Mr.
Angier was married to Miss Antoinette Hale, a native of St. John’s, Clinton
County, Michigan; and a daughter of John R. and Dora (Miles) Hale. When she was eight and one-half years old,
her father migrated to California with his family, and settled at Lodi, and he
became an extensive fruit grower, located three miles southeast of Lockeford,
where he lived for about three years.
There she attended the Lockeford school; but
her father moved to Lodi and went into the fruit trade, and so she attended the
Salem school, and rounded out her studies at the Stockton Business
College. Her father lived to be ninety
years old, and her mother attained the fine age of seventy, and they both died
in Lodi. She was one of a family of
three children, and she also had a half-brother and a half or step-sister, as
follows: John R. Hale, Bessie (who died
at the age of five), and Frank Orland and his sister, Emma. Six children have blessed this happy
union: Harold, taking an agricultural
course at U. C. in Berkeley; Addine, Ellsworth,
Newell, Antoinette and Lemoise. Mr. Angier very willingly accords to his able
and devoted wife much of the credit for their common success and progress, by
which they have become among the most useful, influential and representative
people in the Valley; for in the course of their ranch-development, there were
times when his wife had to cook for as many as fifty farmhands, and that, too,
while they were living in a small home.
Prior to her marriage, Mrs. Angier was a gifted woman in dramatic
expression, and for years conducted a class in that difficult subject. It is pleasant to learn, therefore, that this
hard-working and very deserving couple, who so long bore the burden and the
heat of the day, erected at a cost of some $30,000, one of the very finest
country residences in all the San Joaquin Valley, and which is furnished with
the delicate taste for which Mrs. Angier has long been known.
Transcribed by Gerald Iaquinta.
Source: Tinkham, George
H., History of San Joaquin County, California , Page
755. Los Angeles, Calif.: Historic
Record Co., 1923.
© 2011 Gerald Iaquinta.
Golden Nugget Library's San Joaquin County Biographies
Golden Nugget Library's San Joaquin County Genealogy
Databases