Colusa Biographical Sketches.
CHAPTER XII.
JAMES BALSDON.
This gentleman is one of the most prosperous farmers of Grand Island. He is a native of Indiana and born in 1824. He came to California in 1852 by way of New Orleans and the Isthmus. He stopped over on the voyage in Central America and then renewed his journey in the North America but was wrecked ninety miles from Acapulco. He reached San Francisco May 3, 1852, tried mining and met with little success and then concluded to try farming. Hearing of Grand Island and meeting with Samuel Morris, who owned ten thousand acres of land at the head of the island, he proposed leasing to Balsdon all the land he wanted at one-fifth of its product, but afterward proposed to sell any part at four dollars and a half an acre. Balsdon then bought three hundred and sixty acres and began cultivating it in the fall of 1853. He remained there eight years and then sold out to E. Fisher. He purchased, in 1861, a squatter's title to three hundred and twenty acres and took up four hundred acres. He purchased in addition several other large tracts and now his home farm embraces in all nineteen hundred and twenty acres. This place is five miles from the railroad and four from the river, thus affording two outlets for the shipping of his products. He has raised in one season as high as eighteen thousand bags of wheat and barley. He has a large and handsome residence, built in 1871, surrounded by a natural grove, which is a home of contentment and prosperity. He is also very much interested in the cultivation of fruits.
Mr. Balsdon was married, in San Francisco, November 20, 1866, to Mrs. Lauretta Tripp, of Townsend, Vermont, by whom he has had two children, though Mrs. Balsdon was the mother of two children by her previous marriage.
COLUSA COUNTY
ITS
HISTORY TRACED FROM A STATE OF NATURE
THROUGH THE EARLY PERIOD OF SET-
TLEMENT AND DEVELOPMENT,
TO THE PRESENT DAY
WITH A
DESCRIPTION OF ITS RESOURCES, STATISTICAL
TABLES, ETC.
ALSO
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES OF PIONEERS AND
PROMINENT RESIDENTS
by Justus H. Rogers
Orland, California
1891
Page 343-465
Transcribed by: Linda Diane Jackson 6/25/2009
Colusa County Biographies ~ Archive Biography Index ~ Archive Index
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