Santa Barbara County Biographies

W. F. JOHNSTON

Submitted by Peggy Hooper

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


W. F. JOHNSTON, a prominent rancher and stock-raiser of Santa Maria, was 
born near "Jefferson City, Missouri, April 4, 1836. His father, George K. Johnston, 
was a native of Virginia, and emigrated in boyhood to Kentucky. At the age of 
twenty-one years he was married at Monticello to Miss Nancy Jane Upton, and soon 
after their marriage they removed to Missouri. The subject of this sketch lived at 
home until manhood, acquiring meantime a common-school and academic education, 
and four years thereafter he spent in teaching district schools. In the winter of 1859, 
becoming imbued with the spirit of goldmining, the excitement then existing in the 
Pike's Peak region, about the 30th of March he started for the mines, and arrived at the 
mouth of Cherry Creek, near where the city of Denver now stands. After prospecting 
unsuccessfully for three weeks, he decided to go on to California, and with a friend he 
struck out over the Cheyenne trail for Salt Lake City, thence on to the head of the 
Humboldt River, across the Humboldt desert to Carson River, and across the Sierras to 
Hangtown and Sacramento, arriving September 13. After spending a few months in 
Yolo County, he taught school one term in Sonoma County, near Mark West Creek. He 
then went to the Washoe mines in Nevada, where, with many hardships and privations 
in its mountain mining towns, he lived for about twelve years, but, never forgetting 
the beautiful Santa Rosa Valley, and one of its more beautiful inhabitants, in October, 
1865, he returned there and was married to Miss Mary M. McCorkle, then a teacher in 
one of its schools. In the fall of 1872 he left Nevada and came to Guadaloupe, and 
since that time has been extensively engaged in grain-farming and stock-raising in the 
Santa Maria and Santa Ynez valleys, with varied success. Mr. Johnston has worked 
long and hard to make improvements in the valley, and his beautiful ranch of 900 acres 
near Lake View depot, with its thirty-acre orchard and other substantial improvements, 
is an ornament to the locality. He has also an eighty-acre tract near town, and some 
town property. He owns the Aliso Rancho of 9,000 acres on the Santa Maria River, 
where lie has 300 head of cattle and 225 horses, and where he breeds both trotting 
and work horses. He owns the stallions Ben Wade and Sultan, the latter a Norman horse 
weighing 1,600 pounds. Mr. Johnston has for many years fanned from 1,000 to 2,000 
acres. He has never been an aspirant to office. They have five children living, four 
sons and one daughter. 

History of Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo and Ventura Counties, California  - by 
C.M. Gidney, Benjamin Brooks, Edwin M. Sheridan, Vol I, II.  -Lewis Publ. Co., 
Chicago, 1917.