Kings County Biographies


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



H. G. LACY
 
manager of the Hanford Mill and Electric Light Plant, was born in Suffolk 
County, Massachusetts, in 1835.  His father, David Lacy, was a native of Canton, 
Massachusetts, where he became prominent as a wholesale manufacturer of edge 
tools and hardware.  Our subject left home at the early age of sixteen years and 
went to Geneva, Illinois, where he learned the machinist�s trade in the house of 
E. Danforth, manufacturer of mowers and reapers.  In 1857 he moved to Fort 
Scott, Kansas, where he engaged in the milling business, erecting both flour and 
saw mills, which he operated about eighteen years.  In 1875 he came to 
California, settling at Visalia, where for fourteen years he was engaged in 
mechanical engineering, in milling and running threshing and farm machinery.  In 
1889 Mr. Lacy came to Hanford, in the employ of J. H. Johnson, of Visalia, to 
superintend the construction of a steam flour mill, he having unlimited 
authority to build according to his own ideas.  The mill, four stories high, is 
equipped with the improved roller machinery, with the capacity of 100 barrels 
per day.  In the spring of 1891 Mr. Johnson put in an electric-light plant, 
after the Edison incandescent system, with a capacity of 1,000 lights, 
sixteen-candle power each.  After two months the business so increased that 
larger engines were required, and he added new machines and boilers with a 
capacity of 130-horse power, and will double the capacity of lighting machinery. 
 The mill is kept steadily running, with a home market sufficient to consume all 
the flour.
            Mr. Lacy was married at Geneva in 1854, to Miss Emma Winship, a 
native of New York, and they have four children, -- Clara, now Mrs. James 
Dempsey, of Kansas; Richard, Lora and Mell.  The latter superintends the working 
of the electric-light plant.  Mr. Lacy has a twenty-acre fruit ranch near 
Visalia, with town property at Hanford, where he resides, and is a faithful and 
competent manager of the interests which he has in charge.
 
Memorial and Biographical History of the counties of Fresno, Tulare and Kern, 
California
Chicago, The Lewis Publishing Company, 1892 p.420-421
Transcribed by Kathy Sedler