California Biographies 

Source:
History of Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo and Ventura Counties, California
by: C M Gidney - Santa Barbara. Benjamin Brooks - San Luis Obispo. 
Edwin M Sheridan - Ventura
Volumes II - Lewis Publishing Company, Chicago, ILL., 1917

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


Guy T. STETSON, who is one of the orange growers of. the Ojai Valley. a director in the Ojai 
Orange Association, and formerly secretary and director of the Farm Bureau of Ventura 
County, was born in Sioux City, Iowa, February 25, 1884, a son of Henry Elmer and Harriet M. 
Stetson.
Henry Elmer Stetson, his father, now living retired at Santa Barbara, has also had an important 
share in the development of Ventura County's resources. He was born at Farmington, Illinois, 
April 21, 1861, was educated in the public schools, the Academy at Lake Forest, Illinois, and 
Andover Academy at Andover, Massachusetts, and after the completion of his education he 
removed to Sioux City, Iowa, where he engaged in the wholesale commission business. Though 
very successful and building up a splendid enterprise, ill health made it advisable for him to sell 
out in 1893, and after several years of residence abroad he came in 1896 to the Ojai Valley of 
Ventura County, buying seventy-five acres of land. Under his personal supervision five acres of 
this were set out and developed as an orange grove. The ranch was largely in the nature of an 
investment and a means of recreation, and in 1912 he sold a part of his holdings to his son Guy 
and has since lived in Santa Barbara.
Guy T. Stetson had an exceedingly liberal education preparatory to his entrance into 
commercial life. He attended public schools until his parents came to California in 1896, and 
here he entered the noted Thacher School for Boys at Nordhoff and remained a student in that 
model preparatory school five years. He then went East to his father's old school, the Andover 
Academy at Andover, Massachusetts, where he was graduated in 1902, following which, 
perhaps as a result of the early influences of the Thacher School, whose head is a prominent 
Yale graduate, he entered Yale University and was graduated in 1906.
Mr. Stetson for the next three years was receiving teller in the Commercial German National 
Bank at Peoria, Illinois, and then returned to California. For a year he worked on his father's 
ranch in the Ojai Valley, and left that employment to become receiving teller for the First 
National Bank of Fresno, California. He remained with the bank only six months, returning to his 
father's ranch, and in 1912 purchasing fifty- four acres of that, which he at once proceeded to 
develop as a fruit raising proposition. He now has seventeen acres in oranges and six acres of 
olives. He is also a stockholder in the Santa Barbara Olive Company.
He is active socially, a member of the Jack Boyd Club of Nordhoff, the Ojai Men's League and 
the Yale Club of Southern California, and is a Delta Kappa Epsilon college fraternity man. 
Politically he is a republican. In Ventura on August 14, 1912, he married Inez Carrie. Mrs. 
Stetson is a native of Illinois and a daughter of John Carrie, a capitalist and rancher of Ventura 
County and founder of the First National Bank of Ventura. He is now deceased. His oldest son, 
Edgar, is now cashier of that bank. Mr. Came was prominent in the development and progress 
of the county and was one of the large land holders. Mr. and Mrs. Stetson have one child, 
Thomas Came Stetson, three years old.