Читать книгу History of Fresno County, Vol. 6 - Paul E. Vandor - Страница 5

A young man who has undergone the experience of so many in sacrificing important interests in order to respond to the call of their country in the late war is Edward Johnson, the senior partner in the firm of Johnson Brothers, ranchers, who are renting the Lindquist estates. He was born near Grantsburg, Wis., August 14, 1886, the son of John A. and Betsy ( Erickson) Johnson, who were parents of eight children — six sons and two daughters. With the exception of two sons, who are living in Minnesota, the entire family is now in Fresno County, in the vicinity of Kingsburg. Edward, the third child, grew up in Wisconsin; he received a very limited schooling, he worked on his father's farm, and while yet a youth, hired out by the month, after which he made for Minneapolis. There, until he was twenty-six, he was employed in the Pillsbury Flouring Mills.

In that year he removed to .Montana, and near Skelley homesteaded 160 acres, which he farmed and proved up and was just about to profit by, as a grain and stock farmer, when he was drafted into the American Army, and therefore compelled to sell his Montana interests. It was not easy to part with that which had been acquired through so much hard labor and risk, but the consciousness of duty and its obligation impelled him on and enabled him to come through like a man.

Mr. Johnson served at Camp Lewis for five months, and was then transferred to Vancouver, Wash., having served in the infantry at Camp Lewis and in the aviation in the North. He was honorably discharged on December 23, 1918, and reached his parents' home December 25, 1918, at their ranch in the vicinity of Kingsburg, Fresno County.

At Oakland, on January 2, 1919, Mr. Johnson was married to Miss Nellie Rabe, of Portland, Ore.

The farming operations of the Johnson Brothers are carried by our subject and a younger brother, Alvin Johnson, who was also born in Wisconsin, who came out to California in 1918 direct from Wisconsin, where he had worked on a farm.

The ranches operated by the Johnson Brothers are the forty acres of Mrs. Lindquist, the ten acres of Alfred Lindquist, adjoining, and another fourteen acres of Muscats belonging to still another of the same family, three and a half miles northeast of Kingsburg.