JOHN B. BEAUMONT
Bio-Pen Pictures
SURNAMES: ROBERTS,HUBBARD, EARLE
One of the thoroughly self-made men of Santa Clara County is John B. Beaumont, who has been for the past twenty‑eight years engaged and interested in the manufacture and sale of lumber in Chicago and Michigan. He is now interested, with his son, J. M. Beaumont( bio is below), in the drug business, in San Jose, besides which he is engaged in horticulture, owning, and taking an especial pride in, two model fruit farms, one of ten acres, on the Stevens Creek road, the other, of five and one‑half acres, on Saratoga Avenue. On the Saratoga Avenue place he has planted seventy-six pear, and six hundred and thirty prune trees, which are in full bearing. On the Stevens Creek road place are a few almonds, walnuts, figs, and olives, besides three hundred peach trees in full bearing, one hundred and fourteen Bigarreau cherry trees, four hundred apricot trees, five hundred vines of table grapes, ninety-five egg plums, and four hundred and twelve prune trees, just coming into bearing. Mr. Beaumont's horticultural ventures, it will be seen, have passed beyond the experimental stage into that of assured success.
Mr. Beaumont was born in Middletown, Connecticut, in 1816. His father was born in 1766, in England, coming to America at a very early age, and removing from Canton, Massachusetts, to Connecticut toward the close of the last century. Mr. Beaumont, Sr., built, in 1808, a cotton and woolen factory at Middletown, Connecticut, continuing in that business all his life. He died there in 1865. His brother, James Beaumont, with whom he came to America, built the first cotton and woolen factory in America, located at Canton, Massachusetts, which he operated during his lifetime, dying at Canton at the age of ninety years. James Beaumont was also the inventor of the glazed cotton wadding now so generally in use. The mother of J. B. Beaumont was Miss Bethsheba Hubbard, a daughter of Decico (?) Jeremiah Hubbard, of Middletown, Connecticut, a family descended from the original Puritan stock of New England. She died at the age of eighty-eight years, and is buried by the side of her husband, in Middletown.
J. B. Beaumont attended the usual local schools until his eighteenth year, when he went to Philadelphia, there introducing, with a company, the micaceous brown sandstone of Connecticut. In 1839 he was married to Miss Kesiah Roberts, a native of Philadelphia, and removed immediately to the West, settling in Alton, Illinois. Of this union there were born two children, Joseph M., now in the drug business in San Jose, and Mary E., who married Edward R. Earle, of Sterling, Illinois, now deceased, and who resides with her parents in San Jose.
Mr. Beaumont was a member of the second lodge of Odd Fellows organized in Illinois, and of Wildey Encampment, of the same order, the oldest in Illinois. He is Republican in politics and believes in the fullest protection of American industries. He has a beautiful home at the corner of Second and Market Streets, San Jose, where he will probably pass the evening of his life surrounded by all the blessings which the word " home " suggests.
Mr. Beaumont
never received a dollar of financial aid from any source whatever, but
accumulated his property and wealth by personal energy and enterprise.
Pen Pictures From The
Garden of the World or Santa Clara County, California, Illustrated.
- Edited by H. S. Foote.- Chicago: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1888.
Pg. 598-599
J. M. BEAUMONT.
Bio-Pen Pictures
SURNAMES: ROBERTS,
This gentleman commenced business in San Jose, at Nos. 13 and 15 West Santa Clara Street, Knox Block, November 11, 1885, having bought the drug store of B. J. Rhodes & Co., who established the business. Mr. Beaumont was born in Alton, Illinois, in 1839, his parents, J. B. and K. E. (Roberts) Beaumont, having removed from Philadelphia to Illinois in 1832, and being among the pioneers of Illinois. At that time Alton was perhaps the largest town on the Mississippi River above New Orleans. Letters for St. Louis came addressed to St, Louis, " near Alton, Illinois." Mr. Beaumont remained at Alton until his twenty-first year, attending the public schools of that town, finally graduating at a private boarding-school at Farmingham, Massachusetts. He afterward attended a mercantile college at St. Louis, Missouri, graduating in 1857. He was for three years bookkeeper for the Chicago & Alton Railroad Company, at St. Louis, after which he went into the lumber business with his father, in 1863, in Chicago, remaining four years; later he was in the same business at Big Rapids, Michigan, until 1885. He came to California in August of 1885, and in the following November bought the drug-store which he now owns.
Mr. Beaumont has
been associated with his father, J. B. Beaumont, since 1863, first in the
lumber, and later in the drug business. Theirs is the leading drugstore in San
Jose, and under the thorough and energetic management of its present proprietors
is likely to remain at the front, its location, near one of the principal
business corners of this growing city, being a most fortunate one.
Pen Pictures From The
Garden of the World or Santa Clara County, California, Illustrated.
- Edited by H. S. Foote.- Chicago: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1888.
Pg. 599