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Ancestors of Hildur Richardson

Generation No. 2

      2. Fred Ranney Richardson¹, born April 16, 1871 in Marengo, McHenry Co., IL; died April 2, 1958 in San Gabriel, Los Angeles Co., CA. He was the son of 4. Rev. George Richardson and 5. Justina Belcher Ranney. He married 3. Fern Abbott August 17, 1903 in Denver, Denver Co., CO.

      3. Fern Abbott², born February 13, 1881 in Brant, Calumet Co., WI; died December 30, 1932 in San Gabriel, Los Angeles Co., CA. She was the daughter of 6. Rev. Edward A. Abbott and 7. Sarah Jane Schooley.

Notes for Fred Ranney Richardson:
S.R. Durand:
      "Fred Ranney Richardson was born April 16, 1871 in Marengo, Illinois. At the time of his birth, his father Rev. George Richardson had returned from Colorado to be pastor of the Methodist church in Marengo. His mother Justina Belcher (Ranney) Richardson's parents lived after 1867 on their farm at Koshkonong, Wisconsin, and there was a tradition in the family that she had gone to her parents' home for the birth of her son. If so, both of my dear wife's parents and two of her grandparents would have been born in Wisconsin. We have never checked if his birth was registered as having taken place in Illinois or Wisconsin, but he thought he had been born in Illinois.
      In 1880 Rev. George Richardson went back to Colorado and made his permanent home at Argo, a suburb of Denver; so Fred Ranney Richardson was nine years old when he came with the family to live in Colorado. His father had been one of the founders and a president of the Colorado Seminary, which became Denver University. His older brother, Elbert George Richardson, was the sole member of the graduating class of 1887. Fred Ranney Richardson graduated from Denver University in 1894. A record of his grades from the time he entered the University in March of 1889 until his graduation reveal that he was an exceptionally fine student. He took courses in Latin, French, German, mathematics, physics, geology, chemistry, psychology, literature, history, sociology, and political economy. After graduation, he became a teller in the Central Savings Bank in Argo.
      Fred Richardson and Fern Abbott were married August 17, 1903. They lived in Denver until a run on the bank occurred in 1905. At that time, he worked night and day to persuade depositors that the bank was solvent in order to keep the bank open. He succeeded, but at the cost of a nervous breakdown to himself. Afterwards, he was unable to continue his work at the bank. Doctors advised that to completely recover, he should lead an outdoor life. He and his wife moved to northern Idaho in the fall of 1905 and established a farm near the town of Copeland on the river west of Bonners Ferry, near to where his wife's father had a ranch at that time. They lived there for four and a half years.
      In 1910 when the Richardsons left Idaho to move to California, he bought seventeen acres of land in San Gabriel. Later, he added land for a ranch more than a mile in length and about a quarter of a mile wide. On this ranch, he established the largest facility for breeding chickens in southern California, having usually about twenty thousand breeders. He experimented with crossing various strains of chickens to develop a species that he named Austrawhites, which were outstanding egg producers and resistant to diseases. This type of chicken he sold as baby chicks all over southern California, and even shipped across the country. To operate this large ranch, he employed about two dozen men to care for the flocks housed in small yards, each with a small chicken house. This was before the days when chickens were housed on wire screening in one large building. The operation of the Richardson ranch was primarily for producing baby chicks, but also many cases of eggs for market were produced each day.
      Fred was an excellent golfer. After establishing his ranch in California, he became a member of the San Gabriel Country Club. He and his brother Bert entered many golf tournaments in the Los Angeles area, and he won several trophies. He kept up golf into his eighties, and on a short course of nine holes playing twice around, he several times scored his age.
      About a year after his wife's death, he married second a good friend of hers, a widow named Lulu Stockwell. In 1940 they bought a weekend house at 37 North La Senda in Three Arch Bay, South Laguna. This was a pleasant place with a beautiful view of the ocean. Here he was able to relax often from the demands of the ranch in San Gabriel. After the Second World War, the town of San Gabriel had grown around his ranch property and his land was appraised at such a high value that taxes made it uneconomical to continue ranching at that location. His younger brother, George Richardson, who had an adjacent chicken ranch, sold his property; his son reestablished that ranch near Redlands [northeast of there, in Riverside County]. Fred Richardson, however, decided to retire from ranching and subdivide his property for house lots. This was done with financial success. However, some misunderstandings with his wife over financial investments resulted in a divorce.
      Some time later, he was married for a third time to another widow, Loretta McGregor. He had lost a considerable amount of wealth because of his divorce, so to protect his remaining investments for his two daughters, he established a trust fund. All the income from the trust fund was for his third wife during her lifetime. He established, too, some small annuity policies for each daughter and gave them some generous gifts of stocks.
      After retiring, he became very much interested in color photography, and had a Lika camera with which he took many pictures of his daughters and their families, and many pictures of flowers and scenery. For most of his life he drove Packard cars, but later shifted to Cadillacs. He enjoyed several motor trips in California and the Northwest, and one trip across the country to New England. He also made a trip with his first wife to Hawaii by air.
      I remember my wife's father as a most pleasant and friendly person. When we were living back in California in Palo Alto after 1948, I made frequent business trips of several days' duration to Los Angeles. My dear wife went with me often, and we stayed with her father in San Gabriel. He was always eager to take us in the evenings to his favorite restaurants, where we would have excellent dinners. During spring school vacations and during part of the summertime, he was always happy to have us come with our three daughters to spend several weeks at his beach home at Three Arch Bay. He was a most generous person.
      He died of cancer April 2, 1958, and his remains were buried next to his first wife in the cemetery at the Church of Our Savior Episcopal Church in San Gabriel. His third wife in her nineties was still living into the 1980's on income from the trust fund established for her, and on another fund from investments made from the sale of his home.

Notes for Fern Abbott:
S.R. Durand:
"I knew my wife's dear mother for only a very short time, for she died of cancer at age fifty in 1932, less than two years after Jerry and I were married. I met her early on the morning of the day we were married, when she arrived by train at the Pennsylvania Station in New York City after a long trip across the country from her home in San Gabriel, California. We had breakfast in the Pennsylvania Hotel, and then took a train up the Hudson River to Kingston, where the wedding took place.
The next day, Jerry and I sailed for Europe on a honeymoon trip, so I hardly got to know Jerry's mother at the time of our marriage. She went to Cambridge to visit my sister and her husband, where she was entranced by their three-year-old twins. Then, she went to Milwaukee to visit my parents and meet my brother, Loyal, and his wife, along with several of my parents' friends. On the return trip home, she stopped at Binford, North Dakota, to spend a few days with her sister Ada and brother-in-law Will Colvin.
In 1931 we went to San Gabriel for Christmas with Jerry's parents and her sister Jean. It was during the next five months that I really got to know Jerry's mother, and to love her dearly. I got a job for awhile in Hollywood, and Jerry and I had a small apartment there. Each Sunday we drove over to San Gabriel for dinner with Jerry's mother and father, and each Wednesday they came over for dinner with us. After our meals, we enjoyed duplicate bridge, playing sixteen hands "down" we had previously played, and then sixteen hands "up" for our next session. Jerry's mother was an expert bridge player, and enjoyed these games with us immensely.
Fern Abbott was born in Brant, a town about four miles north of Chilton, the seat of Calumet County, Wisconsin, on February 13, 1881. The county is on the eastern side of Lake Winnebago, and her father was the pastor of the Baptist Church there. Some time later, he became pastor of a church in Lodi, Wisconsin, twenty miles north of Madison. It was from Lodi that Fern left in 1898, at the age of seventeen and with pigtails hanging down her back, for Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Her sister Ada had graduated from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin two years previously, and was teaching school in Denver, Colorado, where she was a friend of the Richardson family. It was when pigtailed Fern stopped en route to Stanford that year that she first met her future husband, Fred Ranney Richardson.
After Fern Abbott's first year at Stanford, her brother Lee was suffering from typhoid fever. She studied the next year at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln so that she could help care for him. After his death, she returned to Stanford for her last two years of college. She graduated in June of 1902 with a major in English, and having also taken sufficient education courses to obtain a teaching certificate. In the list of graduates in the class of 1902, she is recorded as being from Harvard, Nebraska. She spent the following year teaching school near Flagstaff, Arizona. Her stories of a young teacher having to control big, tough ranch boys in class were fascinating; she had the courage to gain and maintain discipline.
During vacation periods spent in Denver during her years in college, Fern had renewed her friendship with the Richardson family; during her year of teaching, she became engaged to Fred Ranney Richardson. They were married on August 17, 1903 in Denver by his father, Rev. George Richardson.
From 1905 to 1909 when they were living in Northern Idaho, she taught school, for which job she had to ride horseback some distance through a forest to a schoolhouse. On one occasion, her horse shied just before coming to a tree, upon a branch of which lay a mountain lion. The lion might have sprung on them, had not the horse balked at going on. Another time, while she was superintendent of schools in an area of Northern Idaho, she was thrown from her horse and lay buried in the snow, unconscious. She surely would not have been found by a search party had not her horse stayed beside her. Her injuries from this accident cause her to suffer so greatly that the only way to keep her quiet was by playing musical records for her on her Victrola. After getting her back to their cabin, Fred had to repeatedly wind up and play this machine for twenty-four hours on end.
On October 25, 1909, Fern (Abbott) Richardson was at her sister Ada Colvin's home at Binford, North Dakota when her first child, my future wife, was born. She selected the name Hildur for her child, having admired one of her pupils, a lovely girl bearing that given name. When she returned to Idaho with her baby, it was so bitterly cold that she was afraid the child would not live through the trip. It was during that winter of 1909-1910 that she and her husband decided to move to a warm climate. They went in the spring of 1910 to Southern California, where her mother was living, and established a chicken ranch at San Gabriel.
A second daughter, Jean, was born in San Gabriel on January 23, 1913. During the childhood of their two daughters, they had a summer home on Catalina Island for a few years. Later, for several years their summer home was on Bay Island (near Balboa Island) on Newport Bay, where it was easier for her husband to get to from the ranch each weekend. Their home in San Gabriel was a beautiful large house at 1200 Broadway, a house of great comfort and spaciousness. It remained the home of Fred Ranney Richardson until his death in 1958.
In 1932, we were back in Milwaukee after I could no longer find employment in Los Angeles, when word was received that Jerry's mother was suffering from cancer and was not expected to live more than a short time. Jerry and our baby Lucia (who had been born in May) went to California to care for her mother. She died just after Christmas, on December 30, 1932 at the age of 51. This was a very sad time for us, to lose such a lovely, dear person.

Children of Fred Richardson and Fern Abbott are:

	1	i.		Hildur Richardson, born October 25, 1909 in Binford, Griggs Co., ND; died May 3, 1997 in Palo Alto, Santa Clara Co., CA; married Samuel Relf Durand February 24, 1931 in Kingston, Ulster Co., NY.
		ii.		Jean Richardson, born January 23, 1913 in San Gabriel, Los Angeles Co., CA; died Abt. 1987; married (1) Arthur(?) Unknown; married (2) Lawrence Hamilton "Larry"; died 1998 in San Mateo, San Mateo Co., CA.

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