California Biographies Source: History of Fresno County, California, with biographical sketches of the leading men and women of the county who have been identified with its growth and development from the early days to the present (1919) History By Paul E. Vandor Illustrated, Complete In Two Volumes Historic Record Company, Los Angeles, California, 1919 Notes: Missing+page1185-1186 Transcribed by Peggy Hooper This file is part of the California Genealogy & History Archives http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~cagha/index.htm W. R. NUTTING. � How a large and beneficent industry may spring from the inspiration, the untiring efforts and the strenuous labor of a great man is well illustrated in the life and accomplishments of William Rufus Nutting, the proprietor of the Fresno Date Nursery Ranch, whose foresight prompted him to found the American Vineyard Company, the California Raisin Ex- change and the California Associated Raisin Company, and whose wide and valuable experience and peculiar, individual genius assured their success, as well as the starting of the Thompson seedless raisin industry in the San Joaquin Valley. Mr. Nutting was born at Hudson, Summit County, Ohio, on September 1, 1850 � a day memorable in history as the date of the arrival of Jenny Lind, the "Swedish Nightingale," in America. The engraving accompanying this article is from a photograph of Mr. Nutting, taken on his sixty-ninth birthday. He is the son of Rufus Nutting, who was a native of Randolph, Vermont, where he was born in 1821. He was a member of the well-known Nutting family, whose first ancestor in the United States was John Nutting, steward of the John Win- throp estate in England, when Winthrop, after June, 1630, with his little fleet of eleven ships, came as governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and settled among the Indians in what is now New England. John Nutting arrived some years later than Winthrop and the earliest Puritan pioneers, and in 1676, at Groton � named after Winthrop*s birthplace in Suffolk, Eng- land � was beheaded by the Indians at the massacre of the whites in what is known as King Philip's War. According to five different authorities on the derivation of the family names of most interest, Nutting is said to have come originally from the Scandinavian Knut, meaning possibly a "knot," or a bunch of people, or perhaps a judge or chieftain of a clan in the Danish, Swedish or Norwegian races; so that it is clear that this particular family did not descend directly from King Canute, King of England and Denmark, a family that seems to have died out. From time to time, in various parts of the country, the Nuttings are heard from, and generally with a laurel or two : Charles Cleveland Nutting is the zoologist of the State University of Iowa ; Herbert Chester Nutting is an educator of the University of California at Berkeley ; and Perley Gilman Nutting is the physicist, long associated with the laboratories of the Eastman Kodak Company and the Westinghouse Electrical Works. Rufus Nutting was a leader in every good work, and in the early sixties started the first farmers' organization in Randolph. Vt. Mrs. Nutting was Sarah Hubbard Nutting before her marriage, born at Groton, Mass., about 1821, on the old farm which had been a part of the Nutting family home for perhaps the preceding hundred years. She spared no pains in the training and early education of our subject, who was sent for a while to the district school and then, still in his home town, to the first State Normal School of Vermont, where, at the age of eighteen, he was graduated from the first course, in the spring of 1868. Prior to that, on account of his father having both a twenty-acre farm and a shop with many wood and iron-working tools, turning lathes, circular saws and other machinery, he had a good deal of training in both farm and shop-work, so that when he left home (on November 5, 1868), he went to work in a factory at Springfield, Vt. On September 1, 1870, he celebrated his twentieth birthday by beginning work as steward of the New Hampshire Reform School at Manchester, where he had charge of certain boys doing the cooking, and of all the boys, about seventy-five in number, at their meals. Getting tired of that work after nine months, Mr. Nutting left, but he was called back and given a somewhat higher position ; and after a few more months he was promoted again and placed in charge of the chair-seating shops, where, within six months, through his organizing ability, he succeeded in raising the earnings of the shops from about $3,000 to $6,600 annually, for which the superintendent gave him full credit, in his annual report to the State legislature. Because, however, his pay was not raised in proportion to the increased earnings, Mr. Nutting accepted appointment, at a higher salary, at the Reform School near Portland, Maine, and from there, after a few months, he was attracted to Baltimore, Md., through a still higher salary. Soon after, too, he was offered simultaneously similar positions at the New Jersey Reform School and the Connecticut Reform School ; and the latter post at Meriden, being better, with more salary, he accepted it, about the first of September, 1873, and remained there about a year. Then the overwork, care and anxieties of the preceding four years brought on a complete nervous collapse ; nevertheless there was some gain, for he can now look back and per- ceive that the four years given to re-forming the human mind had enabled him to reform, improve and organize both many kinds of business and public enterprises. Three years after he had ended his reformatory school work, Mr. Nutting started in Boston, in 1877, the business of fitting fine houses with electric lighters for gas burners ; and the enterprise grew into the Boston Electric Company, a corporation employing one hundred men by 1881 and lasting for about thirty years after he took up his next venture. While busied with this matter of lighting gas by electricity, Mr. Nutting originated, with the help of one of his mechanics, the nickel-plated push-button plate which � has been used to turn electric lights off and on ever since Edison invented the electric light system in 1880; and at the same time he took from the jewelry trade the bead chain, up to that time used for the most part for girls' neck chains, and adapted it to the lighting of pull-burners. This, too. with its acorn pendant, has never been superseded and is universally used in the electric light pull-burners of today. It has been no ordinary delight to Mr. Nutting, in a long life of "starting things," that these two improvements have proven useful to millions of human beings all over the civilized world, and that none of the thousands of bright minds in the electrical business � attracting, though it does, the brightest of intellects � has yet discovered anything better for either purpose. Neither of these devices could be patented, but both have added everywhere to the comfort of living. While in the electrical specialty at Boston, Mr. Nutting had the pleasure of knowing some of the people who were active in starting the first telephone exchange, called the Telephone Dispatch Company of Boston, and he had one of their 'phones installed between his shop and office. He also happened to see Prof. Alexander Graham Bell teaching in a deaf-mute institute in New York in 1873, three years before Bell exhibited the first "talking machine" or telephone, at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. Mr. Nutting also enjoys recalling that he saw Edison's first public exhibition of his new electric light system on the eve of New Year, 1880. or rather the evening of December 31, 1879, although he is bound to confess that he was so closely wrapped up in pushing his own small electric business, and had not yet grown to have a broad point of view, that he was unable to see at once the greatness of either of the vastly greater inventions. In 1881, in sixty days, Mr. Nutting raised $70,000 from among fifty of the largest capitalists in Boston, and in July started what was known as the Herdic system of cheap and quick cross-town conveyance for passengers, using two- or four-wheeled carriages named after their inventor, Peter Herdic of Pennsylvania. They had a crank-axle and a low-hung body, with back entrance and side seats for four or eight people, and came to be much used from 1881 to 1890 for public hire. He ran them from four railroad stations at the south to four stations at the north of the town, and crossed the city in fifteen minutes, while the horse cars of those days took from twenty minutes to an hour or more. In September of that year he started the same system in Worcester, Mass., then a city of fifty thousand people, with a horse-car system running once in half an hour over a three-mile stretch on the main street, for which a fare of seven cents was charged. Mr. Nutting made his fare five cents, and gave transfers to all points radiating from the center like the spokes of a wheel, and the new system proved such a benefit to the city that it grew very popular ; but after a few months the horse railway put in a new equip- ment and ran oftener than the herdics did and at the same price ; and after two years of competition, the railway company succeeded in driving these early "jitneys" out of business. In this enterprise, as with some others since, the community reaped an immense benefit from Mr. Nutting's work, but at a heavy loss to himself and friends. Meanwhile, he had started the same system in Fitchburg, Fall River and Springfield, Mass., and in each case the competition put new life into the operation of the street railways, greatly to the benefit of the public but at a heavy loss to the projectors. This has been referred to by writers as the first "jitney" system in America, although it was really started by Herdic. for- merly of Williamsport, Pa., at Philadelphia and Washington, whereas Mr. Nutting established it in New England, after arranging for Herdic's patent rights. In April, 1881, when the proposed system was first noticed in a brief item in the Boston Herald, that paper remarked editorially that anyone who could establish such a system in Boston would be entitled to a monument on the historic Common ; but if such a memorial has been erected by the Bosto- nians, Mr. Nutting has not yet heard of the honor. It was some satisfaction to him, however, to be told years later that the city of Worcester alone could well have afforded to make him a present of $100,000 for the benefit done that community by the Nutting system of herdics. Following his losses, Mr. Nutting was anxious to get into some far-off country with entirely different conditions, where he could at least hope to capitalize his experience and ambitions and make up his losses ; he therefore took a temporary appointment as manager for California of the Union Mutual Life Insurance Company. In October, 1884, he came to San Francisco with his family ; and partly because the cooperative insurance companies were so popular just then, but largely because he had no acquaintance on the Coast and the Union Mutual was not widely known, it proved impossible to make a success in that line, and for years Mr. Nutting found it exceedingly difficult to support himself and family, and educate his children in the common schools and the University at Berkeley, where he had settled on coming West. In November, 1885, Mr. Nutting performed his first service of wide com- munity value in California when he wrote a column and a half for the San Francisco Evening Post as to what he had learned in Boston, and through an investigation in Dakota and Montana, of the great benefit up to that time of the farm mortgage loan system of the original Lombard Investment Com- Mr. Nutting says no small part of his life-work is due to his teacher at school having given him the following "piece to speak" at an early age. Re- printed now it may help attract some one else to a life of philanthropic activity, instead of only selfish money-making. ABOU BEN ADHEM Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!) Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace, And saw within the moonlight in the room, Making it rich and like a lily in bloom, An angel writing in a book of gold. Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold, And to the presence in the room he said, "What writest thou?" The vision raised his head And, with a look made all of sweet accord, Answered, "The names of those who love the Lord." "And is mine one?" said Adhem. "Nay, not so," Replied the angel. Adhem spoke more low, But cheerily still, and said, "I pray thee, then, Write me as one who loves his fellow men." The angel wrote and vanished; the next night He came again with a great awakening light, And showed the names whom love of God had blest And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest. �LEIGH HUNT.