Charles A. Judd
Furniture and Carpet Dealer- San Jose 1888
SURNAMES; SURATT
Charles A. Judd, furniture and carpet merchant, is successor to Platt Gregory, whose business he purchased for years ago. In 1886 his store burned, involving a considerable loss, and necessitating the temporary occupancy of a store room on the corner of First and San Antonio Streets. From there he removed to his present ample quarters at 133 South First Street. His stock is large and embraces a full line of household goods, parlor, dining-room, chamber, and kitchen furniture. He manufactures parlor suits, bed lounges, spring mattresses, and all kinds of upholstered goods, also woven-wire springs, which he sells on the installment plan, and has a large trade. He has an interest in a store at Santa Clara. Before coming to the Pacific Coast, four years ago, he carried on a retail furniture business in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Mr. Judd is a native of Massachusetts, and is thirty-five years of age. His parents moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, when he was six years old, and he was educated in the city schools. On arriving at man’s estate he essayed to become a farmer, and took up land claims in Southwestern Minnesota, aggregating 320 acres, which he set out to improve. But after putting in five years at hard work, undergoing much hardship, and having his crops devoured by the grasshoppers, he abandoned the place, with the forty acres of timber he had planted, and all the other improvements, and returned to St. Paul almost penniless. His first start in the furniture business was made with $150 capital. Mr. Judd now owns also a joint interest in a fruit farm of thirty-three acres, in young bearing trees and vines six miles from San Jose, on the Los Gatos road, valued at $400 per acre.
The subject of this sketch married, while farming in Minnesota, in 1877—the ceremony being performed on the open prairie for want of a better place—Miss Mary Surratt, a native of Illinois. They have two children: Mabel, aged ten, and Myrtle, six years old.
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.
Transcribed by: Letisha Oddo Pg. 403