Alameda County Biographies

GEORGE W. PATTERSON

Transcribed by Kathy Sedler

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


  
            Was born in East Berlin, Adams County, Pennsylvania, July 26, 1822, 
and in early childhood removed with his parents, Henry and Lydia (Kimmel) 
Patterson, to Greene County, Ohio.  There they resided on a farm till the fall 
of 1832, when they moved to Tippecanoe County, Indiana, and followed farming as 
before.  Early in the year 1849 a joint-stock company was organized in La 
Fayette, for the purpose of mining and trading in California.  This company was 
composed of about twenty members, and each, of whom our subject was one, 
contributed five hundred dollars to the common fund.  They left La Fayette March 
13, 1849; thence by steamer via New Orleans to Port Lavaca, Texas, and with 
teams and pack-horses overland via San Antonio, Santa Rosa, and Durango to 
Mazatlan.  The journey was made in the midst of cholera, of which one member 
(Jerry Starr) died near Durango, and was toilsome and slow from Texas to the 
Pacific.  They remained a week awaiting a vessel, and finally sailed July 13th 
on the brig Louisa, touching there from Sydney.  They were forty-seven days out, 
with barely enough water to live, and arrived in San Francisco, August 29, 1849. 
 Here in the harbor were supplies that they had ordered from New York six months 
before.  The company having dissolved, the goods were divided and the members 
separated.  Our subject, with four others, went to the American River mines, 
where they worked more or less successfully, and the next summer went to the 
Trinity mines.  But with bad investments and heavy expenses, at the end of 
fifteen months he found himself broken down physically and financially, and came 
to Alameda County about January 1, 1851, to recuperate, engaged in farming; 
since he has been moderately successful.  Was married July 11, 1877, to Miss 
Clara Hawley, a native of California.  Has two children, Henry G., and William 
H. Patterson, aged respectively five and two years.
 
History of Alameda County, California�, Oakland, M.W. Wood Publ., 1883, p. 957-958