Tulare County Biographies

JOHN C. JOHNSON

Transcribed by Kathy Sedler

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

 
In the year 1845, on the sixth of January, John C. Johnson was born near 
Palmyra, in Marion county, Mo., a son of William Shirley and Ruth (Risk) 
Johnson. His mother was one of sixteen children of William Risk, an American 
officer in the Revolutionary war, whose shoe and knee buckles were run into six 
teaspoons and presented to her, as she was the youngest daughter in the family, 
and this custom is ever since followed from generation to generation, the relics 
descending to the youngest daughter. She was a native of Scott county, Ky., but 
moved to Marion county, Mo., and during her first winter there saw the snow 
three feet deep on level ground. She was early taught the ways of the housewife 
and often gave members of her family products of her spinning wheel and of her 
loom. Mr. Johnson has a bedspread which was woven by his mother from material of 
her own spinning, much of the work having been done by the light of one of the 
old style grease lamps. By her marriage with William Shirley Johnson she had a 
daughter named Elizabeth, who died in infancy, and a son, John C., who is the 
immediate subject of this review. By her first marriage with James Johnson, a 
brother of W. S., Mrs. Johnson had five children, of whom Mary A. is living. 
William R. married Clementine Adams, who bore him three children, and by a 
second marriage, with Louisa Dale, he had two daughters. Sarah J. became the 
wife of William M. Allen and bore him five sons and a daughter. Joseph S. 
married Rebecca Allen and had five daughters and two sons, all of whom are 
living in California. James H. married Sarah Shanks; daughter of the Rev. John 
Shanks, a Christian minister, and has two children. Mary A. married John W. 
Cason and has three sons and three daughters.
John C. Johnson, who was taken early from Marion county to Lewis county, Mo., 
has not married. He spent much of his life on the farm his father bought of the 
United States government at $1.25 an acre, to which John C. added forty acres, 
making a ranch of four hundred and forty acres. His parents had sold their 
property in Kentucky before they came to Missouri. In 1905 and 1906 he sold off 
the Missouri homestead of the family and in the latter year came to Tulare 
county, Cal., and bought sixty-two acres, thirty-five of which is under vines, 
twenty acres devoted to peaches. He raises also some alfalfa which runs about a 
ton an acre to a cutting. He has taken thirty-five tons of dried peaches from 
his land in a season, which he considers the banner yield. In national politics 
Mr. Johnson is a Democrat, but on local issues supports men and measures he 
considers for the public good. His interest in the general good is deep and 
abiding and he aids to the extent of his ability any movement proposed for the 
benefit of the community.
 
History of Tulare and Kings Counties, California with Biographical Sketches - 
Los Angeles, Calif., Historic Record Company, 1913, Pp 844-845