Fresno County, 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 JOHN SHAFER. � It would be difficult, perhaps, to find a more profit- able subject for entertaining study than the lives of those early pioneers who, having set out for a promised land and weathered all the obstacles and ad- versities of a stormy career, lived to participate in the founding and develop- ment of the great commonwealth of the Golden State, and thereby entered into a reward for their toil and good works not always granted even the most meritorious. Among such Americans of the enviable class may well be enumerated John Shafer, now deceased, a man of insight and great force of character, who was born at Everett, Bedford County. Pa., then called Bloody Run. on February 14, 1824. He grew up in Pennsylvania, attending the first public schools of his section, and himself taught school for several years in Bedford County. The Shafers, of most respectable German origin, had lived in Pennsylvania from early Colonial times, and members of the Shafer family still dwell in the house made of heavy solid red cedar logs where John Shafer was born. He became a drover, and bought and sold cattle for an important firm in the East. In their interest, he went to Texas. Arizona and New Mexico, purchased cattle for the market, and drove them to Philadelphia and New York before there were any railroads in the Southwest. In 1852 he came across the great plains, as captain of an ox team train that outfitted on the Missouri River, and he walked most of the way and was three months in crossing the continent. Arriving in California the same fall. Mr. Shafer bought swamp and overflow land on the Sacramento River, and cut off the timber for wood for the steamboats plying from Sacramento to San Francisco, before the advent of railroads ; and when food and pro- visions were scarce, he planted the cleared land to vegetables, and went in for truck farming as onions, etc. sold for fifty cents apiece, later putting his application to the cultivation of grain, alfalfa, apples and fruit, being one of the first to engage in the important industry of market gardening in the Sacramento Valley. On February 22. 1860, John Shafer was married at Stockton to Miss Matilda Thankful Humphrey, a native of Rochester, N. Y.. who had been reared in Michigan. She crossed the plains in 1854 with her parents in an ox team, and like her husband, walked nearly all the way. Four children blessed their union. The eldest is W. H. Shafer, the civil engineer at Selma, a leader in his profession, who has long been connected with irrigation pro- jects in Fresno County, and whose life is elsewhere sketched in detail in this work. The second in the order of birth is the physician and surgeon, J. E. Shafer, of 2815 Woolsey Street, Berkeley. He was born at Stockton on Sep- tember 28. 1863, and passed his boyhood in Sacramento County, where he attended the public schools. Later, he taught school in different parts of California and then studied medicine, and was graduated from the Hahne- mann Medical College at San Francisco, a member of the Class of '97; in 1889 he was married in Santa Barbara County to Miss Jennie Harman, by whom he has had three children. Since then he has lived in and practiced at Berkeley. The third son is Frank E. Shafer, the retired oil man, who is resi- dent in Pasadena. The youngest child was John A. Shafer, who died, un- married, when he was twenty-one years of age. John Shafer was a public-spirited, high-minded man, and it is not sur- prising that the Shafers have become among the most illustrious of Cali- fornia pioneers. He organized the first reclamation district and built the first levee on Brannan Island; in 1873. He was particularly interested in public schools, and erected the first school house on that island, forty miles below Sacramento. He stayed in Sacramento County from 1852 to 1882, when he moved to the Mendocino district in Fresno County, and there bought a farm of 160 acres, the McClanahan place. Later, he purchased railroad lands in the same vicinity, which he also improved, planting grain and alfalfa, and afterwards vines and trees. He became well-to-do, but not rich, and was influential, so that his death � from an accidental injury � on December 7. 1893, seven months after the demise of his devoted wife, on May 6, 1893, was widely and sincerely deplored. He left in his descendants men and women of virility and force of character, a brainy family with a proper appreciation of historical detail, as one might expect of pioneer blood, and a strong grasp on the essentials of business procedure.