San Bernardino County, CA, Biographies

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


WILLIAM McDONALD, 
 
proprietor of McDonald's furniture and undertaking establishment, San 
Bernardino, the oldest in San Bernardino County, was born in Ireland, in 1826. 
His parents emigrated to the United States before his recollection, and settled 
in Philadelphia, where his father engaged in cabinet-making. The son studied 
architecture and followed contracting and building during the early years of his 
business career, before and after coming to the Pacific coast. Up to 1851 his 
life was passed in the East and South. In the fall of that year he crossed the 
plains to Salt Lake, Utah, and there took a contract to build a mill, on which 
he made enough money to bring him on through to California the following autumn. 
San Bernardino was his home for the first five years after arriving in that 
State, although he carried on the business of contracting and building in Los 
Angeles and vicinity, being the pioneer in that business in Southern California. 
Early in the '50s good mechanics were not to be found, and even very indifferent 
workmen he paid as high as $7 per day. In 1857 Mr. McDonald moved down to Los 
Angeles, and in the spring of 1860 went
up to San Francisco and spent some six months traveling through the finest 
valleys of that part of California. Believing then, as now, that the San 
Bernardino valley is the choicest portion of the Pacific slope, he returned and 
permanently settled here in the fall of the same year. In 1866 he opened the 
first furniture store in the city, and, subsequently associating undertaking 
with it, he designed and built the first hearse ever used in Southern 
California, which he still has in his possession, though its use has been 
superseded by two elegant hearses manufactured by Cunningham & Sons of 
Rochester, New York. Mr. McDonald's furniture warerooms and repository for 
funeral goods are some 300 feet in depth and embrace half an acre of floor room. 
He makes a specialty of the undertaking feature of his business, and keeps in 
stock a large assortment of funeral goods of the best Eastern and Northern 
manufactories. As an embalmer Mr. McDonald has won a reputation extending across 
the continent, and has numerous highly commendatory letters from undertakers in 
the East, testifying to his success in embalming bodies for transcontinental 
shipment. In 1854 Mr. McDonald bought the lot and erected the house in which he 
and his family now reside, in McDonald's Place, between C and D streets and 
Third and Fourth.
        Mrs. McDonald, formerly Miss Mayer, is a native of Staffordshire, 
England, and a relative of the Mayers of that city, famous as pottery 
manufacturers. She came to America when a child of eight years. Mr. and Mrs. 
McDonald have nine living children, five sons and four daughters, all save one 
born at their present homestead, and all but one residents of San Bernardino 
valley. Two of the sons are associated with their father in business. In early 
times Mr. McDonald was politically opposed to the old Mormons of this valley, 
and his out�spoken expression of opinions and free and independent action in 
upholding his convictions, which he held to be the right of every American 
citizen, created no little antagonism of feeling against him on the part of the 
followers of Joe Smith and Brigham Young. The Mormon colonists not only refused 
to sell him any of what they considered desirable town lots; but he had the 
courage of his convictions, and his faith in the final triumph of the principles 
he advocated and upheld, never wavered. He has lived to enjoy the realization of 
his hopes.
 
SOURCE:  An Illustrated History of Southern California:  Embracing the Counties 
of San Diego, San Bernardino, Los Angeles and Orange, and the Peninsula of Lower 
California� Chicago:  The Lewis Publishing Company, 1890.  p.-  503-504
Transcribed by Kathy Sedler