Yolo County Biographies


This file is part of the California Genealogy & History Archives
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J. E. SUGGETT
 
Since establishing a home in Yolo county during the year 1897 Mr. Suggett has 
owned and magaged ten acres of alfalfa land in Willow Oak park, where he has an 
attractive country home.  Since he has made a specialty of alfalfa he has been 
prospered in a gratifying degree and has cut as many as seven crops yearly, 
never taking off less than six crops, which fact in itself speaks volumes for 
the character of the soil and its adaptability to this popular variety of hay.  
It has been found profitable to carry on a small dairy and the owner devotes 
much of this time to the correct care of the splendid milch cows kept on the 
place.  A firm believer in the future growth and prosperity of the county, he 
gives it as his opinion that in all of his travels throughout the west he has 
found no region more fertile, no people more hospitable and no climate more 
salubrious than is to found in his own chosen locality.  
 
A Missourian by birth and a Kentuckian by lineage, Mr. Suggett was born at 
Middletown, Montgomery county, in 1854, being a son of Volney and America A. 
(Holman) Suggett, natives respectively, of Kentucky and Missouri.  During early 
life, many years before the outbreak of the Civil war, Volney Suggett left 
Kentucky for the newer lands of Missouri, where he developed a fine farm from a 
tract of raw land.  About the year 1875 he came to California and bought land 
near College City, where he engaged in farming until his death.  One of his 
sons, George, never left Missouri but continued to farm in the vicinity of 
Middletown, where he married and reared his family of four children.  Three of 
these children, Homer Marvin, Buford and Mattie, came to the west and purchased 
a large tract of ranch land in Yolo county seven miles north of Dunnigan.
 
When about twenty years of age J. E. Suggett came to California in company with 
a party of home-seekers.  Nine days were spent between Omaha and Sacramento.  
Even as late as that year (1874) the country was still wild and in parts 
lawless.  On one occasion, when stepping from the train at a station, he was 
shot at by a Chinaman.  However, he reached his destination in safety.  For a 
time he attended school at City College, Colusa county, where later he engaged 
in building operations and assisted in erecting a drug store and hotel.  In a 
search for cheap land he prospected through Oregon and Washington and in the 
latter state he took up three hundred and twenty acres of government land during 
the year 1883.  At that time Indians were very troublesome and on one occasion 
the savages attacked him so fiercely that he would have been killed had not a 
neighbor hastened to his rescue.  The land was rich and fertile and he harvested 
as much as seventy bushels of wheat to the acre.  On the ranch he had a number 
of horses, also a large drove of hogs and some poultry.  The location was 
suitable from the standpoint of crops, but the country was so wild and 
unattractive that he finally returned to California after an absence of fifteen 
years.  During 1896 he married Mrs. Sarah (Wernekie) Suggett, the widow of his 
brother, William, and one daughter, Marie, blesses their union.  By her first 
marriage there are five children, namely:  Nora, who married A. B. Caveler and 
is living in Mexico; Mrs. Myrtle Parsons; Hermena, wife of Amos Williams, of 
Sacramento; Dewey, who lives in Oregon, and Charles, who remains with his mother 
and assists Mr. Suggett in the care of the home place.
 
Transcribed by Bea Barton
Source:  �History of Yolo County, California� by Tom Gregory.  Published by the 
Historic Record Company, Los Angeles, California, 1913, pages 872 � 874.