San
Joaquin County
Biographies
FRANCIS R. HAMSHER
A progressive and successful
rancher, now living near Youngstown, is Francis R. Hamsher, born in Monroe,
Wisconsin, on July 24, 1866, a son of Francis and Katherine Elizabeth (Denis) Hamsher,
and the grandson of a sea captain in His Majesty’s navy, who saw service in the
War of 1812. Later, he became a
frontiersman, settling in Wisconsin in early days. The father died when Francis R. Hamsher was
five years old. The mother lived to be
seventy years old. They had a daughter,
Edith, who is also deceased.
When Francis R. Hamsher was fifteen
years old, he went to South Dakota, then a part of the Dakota Territory, and
settled near Aberdeen, where his mother took up a homestead and also taught
school. He lived there until he came out
to California, in 1888. Here he settled
near Red Bluff, in Tehama County, and worked for a year, and then came into San
Joaquin County, arriving in the fall of 1889.
He drove the bus for the Yosemite House of Stockton, and later, for
nineteen years, he was engaged during the harvest season in the threshing of grain,
buying and operating a Holt combined harvester and thresher. He farmed about one thousand acres of land on
the islands near the terminus for seven years during that time, and then
purchased a placed on the Lower Sacramento Road, near Kingdon,
a grain farm of forty acres. In 1911,
Mr. Hamsher came to his present location, where he bought 120 acres of land,
one-fourth of which was in vineyard. Since
then he has sold off eighty acres, leaving forty acres. He is just completing a fine new bungalow,
into which he and his wife will move.
On October 13, 1890, Mr. Hamsher was
married in Stockton to Mrs. Florence F. (Hitchcock) Upton, the daughter of Charles
N. and Elizabeth Hitchcock. She was born
near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and came to California with her folks in
1876. She had previously married Walter
Upton, and they became the parents of a son and a daughter: Harvey Upton, ranching on a part of the old
Northrup ranch; and Cecil, now Mrs. Rea, of Stockton. Her father was a native of New York, and a
Grand Army veteran, who was wounded five times during the Civil War. After marrying in Louisiana, and there
establishing a household, he came on to California, and Mrs. Hamsher attended
the grammar schools of Stockton. Three
children have been granted Mr. and Mrs. Hamsher: Katherine, now Mrs. Buskey,
who is living at home with her one child, Olive; Clyde, who is at Oakdale and
has two children, Millert and Caroline Deete; and Bessie, Mrs. K. O. Glover, who has one child, an
infant. Mr. Hamsher has put ten of his
forty acres into alfalfa and he has a fine irrigating well on his ranch. Some time ago he felt that he ought to
straighten out his ranch lines; so he purchased a tract of six acres adjoining,
and now his ranch embraces forty-six acres in all.
Transcribed by Gerald Iaquinta.
Source: Tinkham, George
H., History of San Joaquin County, California , Pages
1035-1036. Los Angeles, Calif.: Historic
Record Co., 1923.
© 2011 Gerald Iaquinta.
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