San
Joaquin County
Biographies
HENRY FINCK
A highly-progressive and very
successful farmer is Henry Finck, a pioneer of Banta district of San Joaquin
County, who was born in Hanover, Germany, September 5, 1844, and came to
America with an uncle and a sister in 1859.
They journeyed to California by way of the Isthmus of Panama, and
arrived in San Francisco in October of that year. His uncle died shortly afterward, and our
subject was obliged to earn his own living when only fifteen years of age.
He first followed clerking in a
grocery store; but he proved such a hustler that at the age of nineteen he
owned an interest in a butcher shop in San Francisco. The shop was on Montgomery Street, near
Union, and thus he grew up and lived in the Telegraph Hill district. In 1866 in company with the three Lammers
brothers, he located in San Joaquin County; and there they took up a quarter
section of government land at Mohr’s Landing, now called Bethany, and bought a
section of railroad land which was farmed to barley. From that date on up to a short time ago
Henry Finck was one of the leading and successful farmers of that section; and
he is now retired. The first year, for
example, he sowed 100 acres to grain; the second, 600 acres; and the third, 1,200
acres. He farmed this up to 1888, and
five years before that he bought land near Banta and at one time owned 1,900
acres.
This last ranch, of which he still
owns 600 acres, was a part of the McMullin & Trahern rancho, and for a number of years he ran a
slaughter house on the West Side, and also had a dairy of eighty fine Holstein
cows. He made cheese, and sold the
output to the Hobbs-Parsons Company of Stockton. He was the first man to build a levee in his
district, constructed on his land for drainage purposes. He bought large tracts of land on Union
Island in 1873, which he again sold in two years, and in 1918 he bought back
1,100 acres of the same, and was one of the largest grain-growers there, having
10,000 sacks in one lot piled up for shipment.
The flood of 1906 caused him a heavy loss in cattle, cows and grain; but
the next year he harvested 1,140 tons of wild oats, on the plains, which helped
to remunerate him. On January 1, 1868, he
killed the last elk known to have been dispatched in the valley. It had come down from the mountains to swim
the river, and weighed 800 pounds when it met its fate of Mohr’s Landing.
Mr. Finck has been twice
married. His first wife was Lena Rohde,
a native of Germany; and they had nine children, the first three sons dying in
infancy, while the others are as follows:
Jenna is the wife of Henry Krohn; Anna is the
wife of Adolph Windeler; and Dora is the wife of
Leland Raab.
The sons are Fred Henry, Harry Carson, and Martin Lammers. Through his second marriage in 1918, Mrs.
Mary (Conrady) Denz, a
native of Baltimore, Maryland, became his wife.
She was the daughter of Dr. C. A. Conrady, a
pioneer German physician, who came to Stockton twenty-eight years ago from Bay
City, Michigan, and practiced here, dying four years after his arrival. Her mother recently died at the age of
eighty-five years. Both parents were
born in Germany. Henry Finck recently
presented each of his six children 150 acres of his Union Island ranch, and the
600 acres of the old home ranch at Banta are now being farmed
by his son Harry. He was a school
trustee of the Lammersville and Banta school districts, and he helped to raise
the money to build the German Lutheran Church at Tracy. He himself is a member of the German
Methodist Church at Stockton. He is a
charter member of the Tracy Lodge of Odd Fellows, No. 177, and in 1921
celebrated his half-century membership of the same. He is a past noble grand of the order; and on
the occasion referred to, was presented with a gold medal, which he values very
highly.
(Since this biography was written
Mr. and Mrs. Finck met with accidental deaths while motoring to their
home. A Western Pacific train struck
them at the East Park Street crossing May 1, 1922, removing from the midst two
of San Joaquin County’s most influential upbuilders.)
Transcribed by V. Gerald Iaquinta.
Source: Tinkham, George
H., History of San Joaquin County, California , Page
1413. Los Angeles, Calif.: Historic
Record Co., 1923.
© 2012 V. Gerald Iaquinta.
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