San
Joaquin County
Biographies
JAMES FRANCIS COSTELLO
Numbered among the venerable and
honored citizens of San Joaquin County is James Francis Costello who is also an
early settler of the county, locating in the Waterloo district of San Joaquin
County forty-four years ago. He worked
for wages about two years, then went into partnership with M. T. Noyes, raising
wheat on the Comstock ridge for several years.
He was born at Franklin, Massachusetts, December 1, 1855, and when three
years old was taken by his parents to St. Anthony Falls, Minnesota, where they
located on a small farm and there our subject received his education. At the age of fourteen years he went to the
lumber camps near the head waters of the Mississippi River on Pokegama Lake and
during the five years spent there he learned much of the language and customs
of the Chippewa Indians. In 1876 Mr.
Costello left Minnesota with a party of four men on their way to Astoria,
Oregon, and on reaching the lumber region of northern Oregon they spent one
season in the camps, enduring hardships and privations. Mr. Costello then came south on a vessel
bound for San Francisco and in the early part of 1878 arrived in Stockton and
the San Joaquin Valley which has been his home ever since. Later when he located at Lathrop he went into
partnership with H. W. Cowell and engaged in breeding and raising thoroughbred
cattle of the polled Angus and Galway breeds.
They herded their stock over the unsettled land where not a furrow had
been turned nor an improvement made and there being no fences, they roamed at
will. Mr. Costello was engaged in this
line of industry for two years, when he went into the employ of the Southern
Pacific Railroad Company at the round house at Lathrop and for the following
twenty-two years he worked in various departments of the railroad company. In the meantime, Mr. Costello had purchased
three small ranches and what time he could take from his railroad work, he
spent improving these ranches.
The marriage of Mr. Costello occurred
in 1887 and united him with Miss Ida E. McKee, a daughter of Eli and Mary
(Dickenson) McKee, sturdy pioneers of San Joaquin County, who came to
California in 1873. Eli McKee was a
soldier during the Civil War and he passed away in 1901, while the mother is
still living and is past eighty years of age, residing at Santa Cruz. Mr. and Mrs. Costello are the parents of
three children: Francis Leroy; Eugene
Earl is married and has two children; Elmo Wright is married and resides at
Oakland. For forty years Mr. Costello
has been a member of Linden Lodge of Odd Fellows No. 102 and in politics is a
Republican. About three years ago he had
the misfortune to lose his eyesight, but he has never lost hope that it will some day be restored.
Many years have come and gone during the period of his residence here, and
he has ever belonged to that class who uphold the public stability along
material, intellectual and moral lines, which is shown by the fact that for
twelve consecutive years he served as school trustee of the East Union
District.
Transcribed by Gerald Iaquinta.
Source: Tinkham, George
H., History of San Joaquin County, California , Page
815. 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