YUBA COUNTY
Biographies & Family Ties
WILSON BLEAKNEY
Wilson was the
youngest member of William and Mary Akey family. At the age of seventeen Wilson
left home with Noah Clark, a neighbor boy, and went to California. The
rough and tumble times of the far west as told by the returning miners was so
thrilling that the two boys could not resist the lure.
They first worked in the California
wheat fields. By this time wheat growing had started. Wilson contracted typhoid
fever and medical care being impossible to secure, he did not recover. When his
boyhood companion, Wilson, was gone the Clark boy lost interest in California
and came home to Pennsylvania and spent the rest of his life on the farm on
which he was born. This farm eventually joined the Bleakney land on the North.
In 1935 a niece, Margareta Patton
Miller, visited Marysville cemetery and drew a picture of the headstone, which
was white marble but the picture was lost.
Submitted by Maryann Little, Feb. 2007 - littlemj@shaw.ca