San Joaquin County
Biographies
ICHABOD DAVIS HAMILTON
ICHABOD DAVIS HAMILTON, a
pioneer in the steamboat enterprises of Stockton, was born in New Lisbon, Ohio,
March 16, 1822, a son of Jonathan and Eleanor (Davis) Hamilton. The mother,
born in Ohio in 1800, died in 1831. Her father, Ichabod Davis, a native of
Maryland, settled on a farm in Ohio, and was there married. His wife died at
the age of fifty, but he lived to be ninety-five. The paternal grandfather of
I. D. Hamilton was an English emigrant who settled in New Jersey. Grandfather
Jonathan Hamilton, Sr., born in that State May 13, 1761, served some time in
the Revolution, and his brother rose to the rank of captain. Jonathan settled
in Pennsylvania, where he was married to Susan Dilts, born in 1754, of
Scotch-Irish parentage. In 1798 they moved to Ohio Territory and settled near
New Lisbon. There the wife died in 1836, and some years later he was married
again at the age of eighty-seven. His son, Jonathan, Jr., the father of I. D.
Hamilton, born in Pennsylvania, July 19, 1797, and brought up in Ohio, died in
Rising Sun, Indiana, in March, 1849. His sister, Susan, born in 1787, by
marriage Mrs. Fife, died without issue in 1886. Another sister, Catherine, also
a Mrs. Fife, died in December, 1884, aged ninety-one.
Jonathan Hamilton, Jr., was a merchant in
New Lisbon from 1830 to 1839, shipping his stock on a flat-boat; he traded
along the Ohio river to Cincinnati, where he opened a dry-goods store. In 1842
he moved to Rising Sun, Indiana, and there again carried on a general store
until his death in 1849.
The subject of this sketch received the
usual education of that period in that section of Ohio and assisted in his
father’s different stores from 1835 to 1849. In New Lisbon there was a
prominent book department in the general stock, and he there acquired a love of
reading.
Mr. I. D. Hamilton was married in Dayton,
Ohio, July 17, 1847, to Miss Eleanor Evans, born in Fayette County,
Pennsylvania, May 5, 1828, a daughter of Rev. David and Mary Ann (Bromfield)
Evans. His mother’s parents were Charles B. and Ruth (Bowers) Bromfield.
Grandfather Charles B. Bromfield, a native of Fayette County, Pennsylvania, of
English descent, was a soldier of the Revolution, and a large owner of land
with coal mines, a mill and a tan-yard near the town of Bromfield, so called
after the name of the family. He lived to the age of seventy, and his widow
survived him many years, dying at the age of ninety-seven years. She raised a
family of eight children, and afterward nine children, and donated lands for
churches, schools and a public cemetery.
The maternal grandfather, Jesse Evans, a
native of Delaware, of English parentage, moved to Pennsylvania and became the
owner of considerable land. He was also engaged in the iron industry, running
three furnaces. He was twice married, having by the first marriage two children--Samuel,
who became a lawyer of some note in Uniontown, and Eliza, who became the wife
of Lawyer Wilson, of Morgantown. The second wife was Mrs. Mary (Fitzbugh)Monteith,
a widow with two children, Thomas and James Monteith. She was born in Maryland,
of Scotch parentage, and was there married to her first husband. To Jesse Evans
she bore two sons and two daughters, of whom the oldest was the future
clergyman David. Jesse Evans was about seventy-two years old at his death.
David Evans, born in Fayette County,
Pennsylvania, in 1808, became a minister of the Baptist Church, and preached
for some time in his native county. His doctrinal views changed, he became a
minister of the Christian Church, and was pastor of a church of that
denomination in Greensburgh, Indiana, for three or four years, and then of one
in Rising Sun, Indiana. He afterward returned to Pennsylvania and was
accidentally drowned in Cheat river in 1862. He had been twice married, first
to Miss M. A. Bromfield, born in 1810 and deceased about 1842, by whom he had
five children--Eleanor, married to I. D. Hamilton, of this city; Ruth, an
unmarried sister, also a resident of Stockton; Rebecca, now Mrs. William
Buffun, of Los Angeles; Lewis, a jeweler of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania; Alexander,
a steamboat captain in the Cincinnati and New Orleans trade. Mrs. Hamilton has
a half-sister, Lousia Evans, the wife of William Bashford, a merchant of
Prescott, Arizona, and a half-brother, George Evans, a jeweler of Pittsburg,
Pennsylvania.
Captain I. D. Hamilton came to California
in 1849, and went to mining in Mariposa. In 1850 he went East by the Isthmus
route and New Orleans, being the first to return from the mines. He came back
the same year with his family, crossing the plains for the second time, and
settled in this county. He first rented the Rough and Ready ranch, but his
crops proving a failure he moved in 1851 to the Charter Oak House on the Sonora
road, which he conducted for a short time, and then purchased the Twelve-Mile
House on the same road, which he carried on until 1864, farming about 1,000
acres at the same time. Before the close of that year he made a radical change
in his business, abandoning hotel-keeping and farming for steam boating up and
down the San Joaquin river, with Stockton as a center of operations. He built
the steamers Fresno and Tulare for that trade, which he carried on until 1868,
when he sold out and embarked in the real-estate business. In that year he
bought his elegant residence on Beaver street for about $5,000. The grounds
cover an entire block, which he has since improved by the erection of a number
of houses, besides ornamenting the unoccupied portion with trees and plants.
In 1873 he purchased the steamer Clara
Belle, of sixty tons, with which to tow barges along the river for the
gathering and distributing of freight, which was transferred at Stockton. In
1878 he bought the Empire City, of 100 tons, for the same service.
Of late years Captain Hamilton has lived
in retirement under his own vine and fig-tree. Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton have had
three children who grew to maturity: Charles Ichabod, born December 27, 1848,
learned the art of printing 1867 to 1870, but worked as clerk to his father
nearly five years. In 1875 he purchased a job printing office, which he carried
on for ten years under the style of C. I. Hamilton & Co. In 1886 he took
charge, as superintendent, of the quartz-mining enterprise of his father in
Butte County, about sixteen miles east of Chico. Mary F., born in Stockton, was
married in 1880 to Thomas Phillips, M. D., now one of the assistant physicians
of the State Insane Asylum; Jefferson Davis, born February 23, 1861, was
educated in the schools of this city, and went to work in his father’s office
for some years. He was married March 18, 1883, to Miss Zelma S. Jefferson, born
in this State, December 11, 1864, a daughter of Abraham and Sarah Jefferson;
her father, born in Virginia, of the historic family of that name, died in this
State in 1865; her mother, born in Indiana in 1841, is living in this county.
Jefferson D. Hamilton died in December, 1885, leaving one child, Eleanor
Jeffry, born July 31, 1885. The widow and child reside on the family homestead.
The deceased husband and father was a young man of much promise and marked
business ability.
In 1886 Captain Hamilton invested in
mining operations with Joseph Phillips, of Los Angeles, developing a quartz
mine in Butte County, sixteen miles east of Chico, where they have erected a
twenty-stamp mill.
Transcribed by: Jeanne Sturgis Taylor.
An Illustrated History of San Joaquin County,
California, Pages 428-430. Lewis Pub.
Co. Chicago, Illinois 1890.
© 2009 Jeanne Sturgis Taylor.
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