Sacramento County Biographies

ALFRED COFFMAN

Transcribed by Debbie Walke Gramlick.

This file is part of the California Genealogy & History Archives http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~cagha/index.htm

  
Alfred Coffman, farmer of Sacramento County, was born in Hamilton County, 
Illinois, June 12, 1823, son of Jacob and Ayre (Fowler) Coffman. The father, 
Jacob, a native of Germany, came to this country when four years old and settled 
in Kentucky, where they subsisted by digging the ginseng and selling it, and 
hunting deer and dressing their skins. He was well acquainted with Daniel Boone. 
He moved to Illinois, and was there during the Black Hawk war, in which he took 
part. He was the first man to settle in Burlington, Iowa, which place he found 
while swimming the Mississippi River after Indians for whom he had a deadly 
hatred. When sixty-two years of age he moved to Missouri, to a town called 
Jamestown, five miles from St. Joseph. He became so fond of frontier life that 
he followed it until his death, which occurred in Illinois, at the age of 
seventy-two years. He shot his last deer in Illinois, while on horseback, 
shortly before his death. His son Alfred has the old rifle with which he killed 
the deer. Alfred, the subject of this sketch, followed farming and 
cattle-raising in Illinois for fifteen years. In 1875 he came to Sacramento 
County, and he and his brother-in-law rented the Curtis ranch, which he worked 
four years. In 1879 he bought a farm of 320 acres, thirteen miles from 
Sacramento on the upper Stockton road one mile from Elk Grove. He was married in 
1844 to Miss Sarah Pemberton, a native of Kentucky, who died in 1865, leaving 
sixteen children, three sets of twins, five living to become twenty-one years of 
age. He was married again in 1866 to Miss Elsie Howard, a native of Iowa, by 
whom he had three children, two of whom lived to become of age. Seven of the 
children of Jacob Coffman are living, the youngest being sixty-six years of age. 
The subject of this sketch carries on a general farming business. He was at one 
time one of the greatest grain-raisers in this county, having had as high as 
7,000 sacks of wheat from one year�s crop. In the State fair of 1887-�88 he took 
a premium on wheat. He raises his own vegetables, fruit and grapes. He has an 
orange tree from which he sold $10 worth of fruit in 1888. He is a member of Elk 
Grove I.O.O.F., No. 274.
  
Source: Davis, Hon. Win. J., An Illustrated History of Sacramento County, 
California. Pages 469-470. Lewis Publishing Company. 1890.