Kings County Biographies


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



 
CHARLES WILLIAM HOSKINS
 
No real success in life is won without a persevering struggle, and the self-made 
man is, in the commercial and financial sense of the term, literally self-made. 
At the beginning he is handicapped by lack of capital, and after that his 
progress must be made in the face of strenuous circumstances and often unfair 
competition. When he has reached the top he knows how he got there and so do 
those whom he has left behind in the race. One of the men of this class in Kings 
county is Charles William Hoskins. Born in Adams county, Iowa, June 8, 1861, it 
was in 1862 that he was taken by his parents to Pennsylvania. He was able to 
attend public schools only two years, but he made the best use of his limited 
advantages and has since acquired much knowledge from books and by an informing 
course of instruction in the college of hard experience. In his infancy he had 
reversed the general rule by going East. He was still but a boy, however, when 
he was in business life as a clerk in a store in Nebraska. In 1891 he came to 
California and in September settled in Tulare county. He moved in 1892 to the 
Lakeside district and opened a blacksmith shop which he operated about a year, 
then, gave up the enterprise as having a not very promising future. He had now 
had experience in selling goods and in ranching and in blacksmithing, and, 
between times, had made himself useful in other ways. Returning to Hanford, 
where some of his experience had been obtained, he again became a clerk in a 
general store. Here he would have seemed to have settled down to the kind of 
business to which he was best adapted naturally and by association. In 1900 he 
became manager of a general merchandise store at Guernsey, which he bought a 
year later and which he conducted with steadily increasing success until August 
1, 1912, when he sold out and removed to his property in Hanford. In 1882 he 
married Miss Alma Atwood, a native of Henry county, Ill., who has borne him a 
son, Howard A., who is in the automobile business in Hanford. Mr. Hoskins is a 
member of the W. O. W., and is a man of public spirit who seeks rather to give 
to, than receive from, the community with which he cast his lot.
 
History of Tulare and Kings Counties, California with Biographical Sketches - 
Los Angeles, Calif., Historic Record Company, 1913
pp.  802-803
Transcribed by Kathy Sedler