Merced County Biographies

OLIVER FRANKLIN JOHNSTON

Transcribed by Kathy Sedler

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

 
        As an intelligent, energetic fruit grower, Oliver Franklin Johnston is 
typical of all that is best in an estimable ancestry. His father is a carpenter 
and builder and at the age of seventy-three is an active and skillful workman, 
able to do a full day's work. They are of that sterling Scotch blood which 
predominates in Canada, from whence they came; hospitable and highly respected, 
they are of the class that are ever regarded as the bulwarks of society. O. F. 
Johnston is the owner of a fruit ranch of thirty-three and a third acres in 
Fruitland precinct, fourteen acres being in peaches and vines, and he resides at 
the ranch home of his parents in the same precinct. Mr. Johnston was born at 
Paso Robles, San Luis Obispo County, on May 26, 1892, the son of John Henry and 
Emma (Crawford) Johnston, the former born in the Province of Ontario, Canada, 
and brought up in Upper Canada near Toronto. The mother was born in Quebec, her 
father of English and her mother of Scotch birth, and she attended the public 
school. After their marriage they moved to what was then the territory of Dakota 
in 1882, and homesteaded 160 acres near Lisbon, now in North Dakota. Mr. and 
Mrs. J. H. Johnston moved from Dakota to California about 1884 and settled in 
Dixon, for four years, where Mr. Johnston worked at his trade. Coming over to 
San Luis Obispo County he bought a farm in 1888, where their son Oliver Franklin 
was born. They had six children, as follows: William, a clerk in a store at Paso 
Robles, who married Alice Luckey and lives in Paso Robles; Elizabeth Grace, wife 
of Hubert Petersen, a rancher in the Par Colony; Anna Mabel, wife of Verne 
Donaldson, in the trucking and transfer business in Livingston; Oliver Franklin, 
our subject; Agnes Isabel, a trained nurse in San Francisco; and Flora, wife of 
Raymond Van den Heuvel of Merced.
        Oliver Franklin Johnston grew up on his father's farm near Paso Robles 
until he was nine years old, and then came with his parents to San Francisco, 
and to the Fruitland Colony in 1910. He is a Republican in politics and a member 
of the Woodmen of the World.
 
History of Merced County, California � Los Angeles, Historic Record Co., 1925
page 825-826