Santa Clara County Biographies


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



 
 WALTER J. GARDNER
 
SURNAMES: McCOY, ARMENT, MURPHY, BLANCHARD, RICH

A successful orchardist and dairyman is found in Walter J. Gardner, whose ranch 
is on the Homestead Road, and on this same place his father settled in 1860. 
Walter J. was born November 1, 1878, the son of L. E. and Johanna (McCoy) 
Gardner, the former a native of Maine, and the latter of Simcoe, Canada. The 
father was a pioneer of Santa Clara County who came to California in 1852, first 
going into the mines of the Placerville district; later he went to San Francisco 
and engaged in the draying business. He then located in the Santa Clara Valley 
and for two years engaged in hunting, furnishing game for the San Francisco 
market.

In 1860 he bought 160 acres on the Homestead Road, a portion of which Walter J. 
Gardner now occupies. The land was covered with brush and he planted it to 
grain. The mother also came to California in the early days. They were the 
parents of four children; Ella, Mrs. Arment of San Jose; Walter J.; Lee resides 
at Watsonville; Eva is Mrs. J. J. Murphy, whose husband is on the police force 
of San Jose; and Viola, a trained nurse, at O'Connor's Sanitarium. The father 
lived to be sixty-three and the mother fifty-eight years old.

Walter J. attended the Collins school and the Santa Clara high school, and later 
Stanford University; afterwards he went to Elko, Nev., and worked in the quartz 
mines in the Tuscarora district near Independence Valley and spent two years in 
this occupation; he then returned to Santa Clara County and assumed control of 
his portion of his father's estate.

During 1903, in Santa Clara, Mr. Gardner was married to Miss Josephine Gardner, 
born in San Jose, the daughter of William H. and Jane (Holt) Gardner, the latter 
born in Liverpool, England. She is one of a family of four children, as follows; 
Henrietta wife of H. A. Blanchard, a San Jose attorney; Walter A.; Rose, now 
Mrs. C. L. Rich; and Mrs. Gardner. Mrs. Gardner's father was a native of West 
Virginia, who crossed the plains to California in 1851 and bought a piece of 
land consisting of ninety acres on the Hester grammar school, and later took a 
course at the Hester Business College.

Mr. Gardner's ranch consists of fifty-six acres, forty-six acres of which came 
to Mrs. Gardner as her portion of her father's estate; one-half of the acreage 
is planted to alfalfa and the balance to fruit; a good well for irrigation 
purposes has been developed on his place, and in connection with his orchard and 
alfalfa, he has a dairy. Mr. and Mrs. Gardner are the parents of three children; 
Walter, Jr.; Carol; and Dorothy.
 
Transcribed by Marie Clayton, from Eugene T. Sawyers' History of Santa Clara 
County,California, published by Historic Record Co. , 1922. page 569