Tulare County Biographies

JAMES ADDISON MOOREHEAD

Transcribed by: Craig A Hahn

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

 
     It was within the borders of West Virginia of today, then a part of the Old 
Dominion, that James Addison Moorehead was born in 1830, and there he remained 
until he was seventeen years old, attending school and learning something about 
farm labor and other work. In 1850 he went to Louisa county, Iowa, where he 
farmed until 1862, and in that year, in company with DeWitt Maxwell and the 
latter�s family, he came overland to California, the slow and wearisome journey 
consuming six months� time. They stopped at Salt Lake, Utah, three weeks, then 
came to Placerville by way of Carson, and from Placerville they pushed forward 
to Stockton, where the train was divided according to the respective 
destinations of the different members of the party. Mr. Moorehead worked a few 
days in a lumber yard in Stockton, and then found employment on the ranch of 
William Bailey, with whom he remained two years, when, with two men of the name 
of Neuel, he went to the mines in Eldorado county, remaining there until 1869, 
when he came to Visalia. Having decided to take up land, he was advised to file 
a pre-emption claim on one hundred and sixty acres of public land six miles 
northwest of Tulare. Upon following this advice he lived there until he legally 
perfected his title to it and then he took up eighty acres adjoining his 
original claim. This land he improved and developed and farmed with success 
until 1906, when he began to rent it out, its tenant at this time being Fred 
Billings. Mr. Moorehead was the first in this section to fence in a ranch and 
the first to file on land here under the advertising law, his claim having been 
entered in the fall of 1869. On his place is one of the largest oak trees in the 
world. The original Grange at Tulare numbered Mr. Moorehead among its members, 
but when its charter lapsed he did not join the new grange which succeeded it. 
For many years a feature of his business was threshing and one of his 
interesting reminiscences is of farming five hundred acres in Stokes valley in 
the period of 1870-73, which were truly pioneer days in that section. 
 
SOURCE:  History of Tulare and Kings Counties, California with Biographical 
Sketches - Los Angeles, Calif., Historic Record Company, 1913  Pp 452, 455