YUBA COUNTY  Biographies

JOHN HORACE BACKUS

            The twilight of a busy and eventful career finds John Horace Backus retired from life’s activities, enjoying the competency earned by years of arduous toil and quietly passing his days in a comfortable home at 269 B Street, Yuba City.  He is a member of an eastern family, born in Kossuth, Des Moines County, Iowa, July 16, 1855, a son of Jabez L. and Martha (Eells) Backus, natives of Connecticut and New York, respectively.  Jabez L. Backus was a frontiersman in Iowa and conducted a hotel at Burlington, that State, for many years; he passed away at Burlington.  The mother spent her last days with her son, John H., in Yuba City, passing away in 1898.  There were three children in the family, Levi L., deceased; George J., of San Francisco; and John H., the subject of this review.

            John H. Backus spent his early life in Kossuth and Burlington, Iowa, being educated in the public schools.  His father died in 1872, and in 1873, with his mother, he removed to Chicago, Ill., where he entered Bryant and Stratton’s Business College, from which he was graduated in 1874.  He immediately entered the employ of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad as a clerk in the main office, beginning in a minor position and working up until he was head clerk in the auditor’s office, when in 1890 he left for California.  He settled at Yuba City where he bought twenty acres of stubble field which he set out and improved to an orchard of peaches, cherries, almonds and prunes.  Mr. Backus disposed of this property in April, 1923, and continues to reside in his residence on B Street that he built and has resided in since 1890.

            On May 25, 1882, at Evanston, Ill., Mr. Backus was married to Miss Minnie May Estee, a native of Chicago, Ill., daughter of Tully C. and Helen (Martin) Estee, both natives of New York State.  Tully C. Estee was a professor in the State Normal College at Albany, N.Y.; later he removed to Chicago, where he retired.  Mrs. Backus is the eldest in a family of three children, the others being Mrs. Harriet Pauline Tower and Mrs. Martha Phillips.  In politics, Mr. Backus is a Republican.  Mrs. Backus is a member of the Marysville Art Club, Yuba City Woman’s Club and Bogue Wednesday Club.

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

p. 1294

CHARLES N. SUMNER

            A wide-awake and thoroughly progressive grower of fruit who has attained to an established success with practical and scientific results of the greatest interest to others as well as himself, is Charles N. Sumner, whose ranch is located one and a  half miles to the south of Live Oak.  He has twenty acres of highly developed trees, the peach and prune predominating.  He is interesting as one of the pioneer growers in that he was with a group of local men whose exceptional enterprise resulted in the formation, out of their own pooling efforts, of the California Canning Peach Growers’ Association.

            The story in brief is that our subject worked untiringly to interest other growers of this county in this project, and with the aid of the Farm Bureau the organization was finally effected.  Mr. Sumner was therefore a member of the initial voting board of the association.  These efforts to further the best interests of all growers have gone on untiringly ever since 1912, when, in November, he came into Sutter County and bought the ranch he now operates, already partly developed by Charles Barker, of Pacific Grove.  Now widely recognized as public-spirited and liberal, Mr. Sumner is one of the active members of the Live Oak Farm Bureau.

            Mr. Sumner was born in Vermillion County, Ill., on July 27, 1875, the youngest of four children of the late Nelson Sumner, a prominent stockman and a pioneer rancher of that county.  He had married Miss Lucinda Rogers, and they came West in July, 1912, to visit relatives at Folsom, Cal., and they liked the region so well that they decided to locate here.  Charles N. attended the University of Michigan, and as a member of the class of 1902 was duly graduated from the law school, when he received the LL.B. degree.  When in college, he was a prominent member of the Delta Chi fraternity.  He never practiced law, however, but in 1904 went to Colorado and took up mining.  Two years later, he returned to central Illinois and entered the employ of the Illinois Traction Co., for whom he did a splendid work in their claims and traction departments.  At the end of three years there, he went to New York as a claim adjuster.  He quit railroading, however, to return to mining, and for six years he was occupied again in mining operations in the Rocky Mountain States.

            After the death of his father, Mrs. Sumner moved to Chicago; and then mother and son decided to come West together, and to go to the home of an uncle, W. A. Rogers, of Folsom, a sturdy pioneer of 1852, who had come here in search of gold.  Now our subject and his mother make their home at their ranch in Live Oak.  He is a member of Lodge No. 267 of the Odd Fellows, and of Lodge No. 783 of the Elks of Marysville.

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

p. 1294-1295

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