San
Joaquin County
Biographies
ROBERT JEFFERSON PARSONS
Fifty years have come and gone and
great the changes that have occurred during the residence of R. J. Parsons in
California, forty-six years being spent in San Joaquin County, a respected
citizen and a well-to-do agriculturist.
He was born near Thorntown, Indiana, September 29, 1844, and was eight
years old when he accompanied his parents to a farm twelve miles north of Cedar
Rapids, Iowa. His father, Lewis Parsons,
was a native of Virginia and migrated to Kentucky in 1831, where he was married
to Miss Polly Kersey and in 1838 they removed to Indiana. Grandfather Kersey was a veteran of the
Revolutionary War and also fought in the Indian Wars and was a pioneer of
Indiana. At twenty years of age, R. J.
Parsons removed to the western part of Iowa, then spoken of as “out west,”
where he engaged in farming and remained there until his marriage in January,
1871, which united him with Miss Susie Arnett, a native of Iowa, whose parents
were pioneers of that state. Her
grandfather lived to be 100 years old, passing away in Cedar Rapids in
1886. On April 14, 1872, Mr. Parsons and
his bride arrived in California and upon their arrival in Truckee encountered
the heaviest snowstorm in the history of that place, which was not much to
their liking, and their journey was continued until they reached Sacramento,
then on to San Joaquin County, where Mr. Parsons began farming on the Brock
place near the Ross Sargent ranch and remained there for twenty years; he then
removed to Butte County where he bought a farm but never lived on it except to
plow it. He sold it at a good profit and
in 1876 he took up his permanent residence in San Joaquin County where he
purchased 160 acres near Woodbridge; two years later he bought another 160
acres. In 1880 he planted eighteen acres
to Tokay grapes which have since brought a fortune to the present owner. In 1902 Mr. Parsons sold his ranch and moved
to Stockton and for ten years was occupied in street and road contracting work;
following this in 1912 he purchased fifty-five acres in the South San Joaquin
Irrigation District where he has since made his home. Mr. and Mrs. Parsons are the parents of seven
children, all born in California. Alfred
Nelson Parsons died when about thirty years old, leaving one child; Myrtle
Louise is the widow of F. A. Marshall of Yakima, Washington; Clara is the wife
of J. S. Hannah of Dunsmuir, California; Elmer Robert Parsons, a construction
foreman, resides at Stockton; Mabel is the widow of G. Napier of Seattle,
Washington; Lela L. is the wife of J. E. Mahin, who
resides on his ranch near Escalon, but is an engineer with the El Dorado
Brewing Company at Stockton; Earl Arnett is in the employ of the Holt
Manufacturing Company. The wife and
mother passed away in Stockton in 1904.
Politically Mr. Parsons is a Republican and cast his first vote for
Abraham Lincoln. He is numbered among
the early pioneer settlers of his neighborhood, and has witnessed great changes
during his residence here as the county has emerged from pioneer conditions to
its present high state of cultivation and prosperity.
Transcribed by Gerald Iaquinta.
Source: Tinkham, George
H., History of San Joaquin County, California , Pages
878-883. Los Angeles, Calif.: Historic
Record Co., 1923.
© 2011 Gerald Iaquinta.
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