YUBA COUNTY  Biographies

MRS. MARY K. BUELL DEAN ADLOFF

            A successful rancher, living six miles north of Knights Landing, is Mrs. Mary K. Dean Adloff, who in girlhood was Mary K. Buell, the daughter of Dr. Elisha and Mary (Stafford) Buell.  Her father was a native of Baltimore, Md., while her mother came from Waynesboro, N. C.  Dr. Buell came to Marysville, Cal., by way of Panama, in 1849, and here practiced medicine.  He had attended one of the most celebrated medical schools in the United States, that in connection with the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and had also derived what he could from courses in the best medical school in Missouri.  In California, he was successful in discovering what was acknowledged to be a particularly fine remedy for malarial fever, and was called in for consultation by many doctors in both Yuba and Sutter Counties, and far up into the mining country, to treat fever cases.  Our subject often went on these errands of mercy with her father, so that she came to have a rather remarkable knowledge of this section of California.  In the latter part of his life, her father sought outdoor activity, and followed farming instead of medicine.  Dr. Buell died in 1877, at the age of seventy-three, on the ranch where he had settled and made him home in 1867.   This place consisted of 133 1/3 acres six miles north of Knights Landing, and was originally a strip of Federal land and today Mrs. Dean Adloff holds the original patent, issued under the authority of Abraham Lincoln’s signature, which is affixed thereto.  Mrs. Buell’s first marriage united her with Green Riggins; and they had a family of seven children:  William, Rebecca, Ellen, Loren, Sarah Jane, Angeline, Frank, and Henry Riggins.  Green Riggins was a pioneer merchant who came from Laporte, Ind., to California about 1850.  He returned East and brought his wife and six children across the plains in 1852.

            Mary Buell attended the Marysville schools, and also the public schools of San Francisco, after which she enjoyed three years at Mills Seminary, finishing with a business course at Woodland.  Then she took up telegraphy, and thereafter served for three years as floor manager in the telegraph companies’ office in San Francisco.  She was married the first time at Stockton, on April 11, 1895, to Lucius Malcolm Dean, a native of Madison, Wis., and the son of Capt. Lucius and Mary (Malcolm) Dean, the former a Mississippi River captain well-known in his day.  L. Malcolm Dean had commenced his schooling in New York, and later had continued his studies in Nebraska; and after a while he came out to Oregon.  He was a newspaper man, and as a pioneer journalist he had newspapers in various parts of the West.  At one time, he worked on the Home Alliance of Woodland, and also on the newspaper at Esparto.  He died twenty-seven years ago, leaving a family of four children, Buell Elisha, at present farming on the old home place, and Elizabeth Buell being the only two now living.

            Mrs. Dean lived in Oakland for several years after her husband’s death; but she has recently come to live with her son, who is farming the old Buell ranch, devoted to general agriculture, with a small dairy of fifteen cows.  On December 6, 1921, Mrs. Dean married Charles Adloff, a native of Eau Claire, Wis., who follows the profession of a cook, being a master of the culinary art.

History of Yuba and Sutter Counties, Historic Record Company, Los Angeles, 1924

p . 1312-1313

WILLIAM KENT NORRIS

            A progressive, successful rancher whose capital has been his intelligent industry and optimism, and whose experience has proven of the greatest value to his fellow-farmers, is William Kent Norris, of Sutter City, a native of Tennessee.  He was born at Taylorville – later called Mountain City – on April 24, 1871; and his father and mother, Jacob H. and Loretta L. (Adams) Norris, were also natives of that Southern State.  Jacob Norris was a carpenter and a cabinet-maker; and when he died, at the age of fifty-three, those who knew him felt that the world had lost an honest man.  Mrs. Norris was equally esteemed and beloved, and she breathed her last at Stockton, in 1900.  Jacob Norris was a veteran of the Civil War, and served from September 24, 1863, to September 5, 1864, as a member of the 13^th Regiment, Tennessee Volunteer Cavalry.

            At the age of sixteen, William Norris started out for himself, and went to Monroe County, Mo., where he remained for two years.  From there he came to California in 1889, making Marysville the last stopping-place of his journey; and he immediately went to work as a ranch-hand in Sutter County, finding employment with S. E. Wilson in the Tudor district.  Afterwards he worked as a fireman in Texas, on the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railroad.  In 1894 he came back to Sutter County; and in 1898 he went north into Washington, locating in the Big Bend country, near Harrington.  He homesteaded eighty acres of government land, and later proved up; and then he bought an adjoining 480 acres of fine grain land.  He remained in Washington until 1907.  On his return south, he went to Durham, Butte County, where he developed twenty acres of almond orchard for the next seven years.  In 1914 he came to Sutter County, and soon purchased forty acres of the home place, and another forty acres of open land to the south of the railroad.  The former he developed to prunes and the latter to almonds, and after a while he sold his prune orchard.  Today, he has twenty acres in almonds.

            Near O’Banion Corners, in Sutter County, Mr. Norris was married, on February 17, 1895, to Miss Josephine Turnipseed, a native of Yuba City, where she was born in 1875, the daughter of Solomon and Sarah (Coates) Turnipseed, pioneers in California.  She attended the Gaither school; and her parents having died when she was very young, she was received into the family circle of Dexter Tuttle, of Colusa County.  One son, Ivan, has blessed this union.  Mr. Norris belongs to both the Masonic order and the Knights of Pythias, at Harrington, Wash.

History of Yuba and Sutter Counties, Historic Record Company, Los Angeles, 1924

p . 1313

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