San
Joaquin County
Biographies
EDGAR WOODRUFF
For thirty years actively identified
with the development of Stockton as one of the city’s best known building
contractors, Edward Woodruff is now enjoying life in caring for his ten-acre
fruit ranch at Linden. Mr. Woodruff was
born at Faribault, Minnesota, July 16, 1858, and after finishing his schooling
there he learned the carpenter’s trade.
He was only eighteen when he made his first venture as a building
contractor, and since that time, until about a year ago, he has followed this
work with great success. For ten years
he operated in Lyon County, Minnesota, building residences, flour mills and
elevators, and in the fall of 1890, he came to California, settling first at
Oakdale, where he remained for eight months, arriving in Stockton in 1891, and
this has since been his home.
Among the buildings Mr. Woodruff has
erected in Stockton may be mentioned the following: the Stockton Record Building; the Wheat and
Starch factory, which later burned, the Baldwin Block, the Terry Building,
superintended the construction of the Odd Fellows Building and the Stockton
Hotel, built the German Methodist Church, the Odd Fellows Building at Tracy,
the residences of Joe Peters on Cherokee Lane, Colonel Ketchum at Linden, and
Francis Hodgkins, at Lathrop, and many of the fine
homes of Stockton. He was a pioneer in
the Sperry addition, as he bought the first lot and erected the first house
there. It was still a grain field,
having just been put on the market, and no streets had been put through. Mr. Woodruff built a wooden sidewalk from his
residence to North Street and this was the first entrance to the tract. He bought a number of lots there, built and
sold the houses and erected many homes for others. He still owns two apartment houses and two
residences there.
While a resident of Minnesota, on
May 30, 1888, Mr. Woodruff was married to Miss Carrie B. Reed, a native of Rice
County, that state, born August 7, 1864, and they have one daughter, Dorothy
C., the wife of F. R. Shutes of the contracting firm
of Shutes & Zinck. She is the mother of two children, Stanford
Woodruff and Janet Ray. Since his
retirement from the building business in 1921, Mr. Woodruff has devoted his
time to the development of his acre ranch at Linden, which he has owned for the
past eight years, and through his care it has become a valuable property. It is planted to prunes and walnuts and ten
tons of prunes were taken off of it in 1922.
Mr. Woodruff is prominent in Odd Fellow circles, being a member of Truth
Lodge.
Transcribed by Gerald Iaquinta.
Source: Tinkham, George
H., History of San Joaquin County, California , Page
583. Los Angeles, Calif.: Historic
Record Co., 1923.
© 2011 Gerald Iaquinta.
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