Merced County Biographies

IRA S. HART

Transcribed by Kathy Sedler

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

 
        A man who has in many ways proved a valuable citizen of Dos Palos, 
Merced County, is Ira S. Hart. The movement that has placed him in high regard 
by his fellowmen is his activities to obtain a larger irrigation district for 
the West Side, taking in some 208,000 acres of land not now covered by canal. 
The son of John and Mary (Jolliff) Hart, he was born in Blackford County, Ind., 
on September 22, 1873. His parents were both natives of Indiana, where the 
father was a farmer. Later he moved the family to Kansas, where the children 
were reared in Morris, Pratt and Cherokee Counties; later the father took up a 
timber claim in Nebraska. There were eleven children in the family, viz.: Ira, 
Alice, Jacob, Henry, Anna, Rachael, Katherine, Lee and Dora (twins), James, and 
John.
        Ira S. Hart was only three years old when he was taken to Kansas. At the 
age of eighteen he went to work in the mines at Galena, Kans., and for the 
following sixteen years he prospected in Kansas and Arizona. In the fall of 1907 
he came to California and worked on construction work near Willows for a couple 
of seasons, then in 1908, he bought a ranch in the Dos Palos Colony in Merced 
County, about one mile east of Dos Palos. It was an improved ranch of twenty-two 
and a half acres on which he raises alfalfa and vegetables and where he set out 
eight acres to Thompson seedless grapes.
        On December 9, 1894, Ira S. Hart was married in the Shawnee Reservation; 
Indian Territory, to Miss Mary Price, a native of Clay County, Mo., and daughter 
of Robert and Mary (Stephens) Price, both being natives of Missouri, where her 
father was a farmer and merchant in Rich Hill. The daughter, Mary, was one of 
five children, namely: John, Lee, Fannie, Anna Belle and Mary. There is one 
child, Viola, in the family of Mr. and Mrs. Hart. Mr. Hart is a Democrat in 
politics. He served as a deputy marshal in several strike uprisings in Kansas. 
He is a mechanic and has done considerable constructive work on large buildings 
in Los Banos, and he ran threshing machines in the grain and rice fields on the 
West Side. When young, he enlisted in Troop K, 3rd U. S. Cavalry, and trained at 
Fort Sam Houston, Texas, but was discharged on account of physical disability.
 
History of Merced County, California � Los Angeles, Historic Record Co., 1925
page 880-881