San
Joaquin County
Biographies
JOSEPH M. CORSON
A well-known citizen of the Lodi
vicinity is Joseph M. Corson, who has had his permanent home in California
since 1876. He resides with his family
on his well-improved ranch of forty-five acres, five and a half miles southwest
of Lodi in the Henderson School District.
A New Englander by birth, having been born in Somerset County, Maine,
October 19, 1859, he is a son of Lysander and Susan C. (Morrison) Corson, both
parents being born and reared in Maine.
Great-great-grandfather Morrison was a soldier in the War of 1812. Lysander Corson was a farmer in New England
and reared a family of seven children:
Charles; May, Mrs. F. R. Clarke, resides in Stockton; Joseph M. is the
subject of this sketch; Augustus resides in Lodi; Addie, Mrs. Edding Holt, resides in Maine; Belle, Mrs. Ulysses Holt,
also resides in Maine; Henry Lysander is an attorney in San Francisco. The mother passed away in Maine in 1881.
Joseph M. attended grammar school in
Somerset County and finished with a year’s business course after coming to
Stockton. He was fifteen years of age
when he began to work for himself, working two years in a
sawmill, then for a year in the timber of Moosehead Lake, Maine. In 1876 he came to California where he worked
on farms, then rented a farm near Linden containing 400 acres and for eighteen
years he engaged in grain and stock raising to good advantage; he then removed
to a ranch seven miles northwest of Lodi on the Walnut Grove Road and bought a
forty-acre ranch, twenty acres of which was in vineyard and the balance used to
grain. Here he farmed for seven years,
when he sold it and went to the Naglee ranch
northwest of Tracy and there farmed 1,000 acres to grain. He then moved to Lodi and made that his home
for a time; then purchased a twenty-two acre vineyard in the Christian Colony
which he held for two years and then sold and with the proceeds purchased his
present ranch of forty-five acres, twenty acres of which is in vineyard;
alfalfa is raised on the balance, the ranch being irrigated by a pumping plant.
The marriage of Mr. Corson occurred
on October 29, 1887, in Stockton and united him with Miss Mary A. Loveland,
born on her father’s ranch in San Joaquin County, a daughter of D. H. and Rachel
L. (McClanahan) Loveland. Her father
crossed the plains to California with an ox-train in 1852, the journey
consuming six months. He worked for a
time in a warehouse in San Francisco and in 1854 came to the San Joaquin County
where he purchased two ranches, one of 160 acres and the other of 320 acres,
four miles east of Waterloo; this he farmed to grain. The mother came to California from Wisconsin
a few years later and their marriage occurred in San Joaquin County and they
were the parents of four children: Mrs.
Corson; Willard, deceased; Mrs. Edna Benjamin; and Leta,
deceased. The father lived to be
seventy-four years old and the mother was forty-two when she passed away. Mr. and Mrs. Corson are the parents of one
son, Cullen D. In politics Mr. Corson is
not restricted by any party lines, but votes for the candidate he considers
best fitted for the office. Fraternally
he is a member and past master of the Valley Lodge of Masons at Linden and both
he and Mrs. Corson are members of the Woodbridge Eastern Star Chapter. Mr. Corson has served as a school trustee of
the Henderson District and was a deputy county assessor under Cy Moreing for the Thornton and Lafayette districts.
Transcribed by Gerald Iaquinta.
Source: Tinkham, George
H., History of San Joaquin County, California , Page
723. Los Angeles, Calif.: Historic
Record Co., 1923.
© 2011 Gerald Iaquinta.
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