There was not much to impress the 25-12 months-previous George Clinton Smith when his wagon practice pulled into the desolate village of Central Town in December 1874. Viewing only six homes and white migrating geese flying higher than, it was comprehensible that he would wonder if he’d produced the proper choice in deciding upon Central City to make his mark on the planet.
Nonetheless, however, he decided to give it a go and designed up a person of the most productive careers that the city has at any time known.
George Smith, son of Joel and Caroline Smith, was born on Dec. 19, 1849, in Hamilton, Ohio.
While Smith farmed grain for a few several years, his to start with crop (with his father) was devoured by jackrabbits and he finished up in financial debt to the tune of $400. He hauled a thousand sacks of barley to Position Sal to promote in hopes of creating ample dollars to fork out off the $400 debt but was significantly from profitable and wound up storing what he did not promote in his barn.
The next year brought minor rain, resulting in the grain prices taking pictures up, generating the demand substantial. Persons from Santa Barbara, on listening to of Smith’s very good provide, rushed up to Central City and purchased the saved grain for $1.60 for each sack.
Smith, a real estate agent who was a developer at coronary heart, was a agency believer in the town of Central Town, soon to be Santa Maria.
When serving as supervisor of Swartz and Beebe Lumber Co., Smith, along with Daniel and George Curryer, ordered an 80-acre tract of land southwest of town, subdivided it, and put it on the sector as city heaps acknowledged as Smith’s and Curryer’s addition to the town of Santa Maria.
This early entrepreneur, a single of the 1st associates of the Santa Maria Board of Realtors (when the town experienced only about five realtors) by no means allow disaster maintain him from selecting himself up and trying yet again. He was claimed to have the uncanny capacity to achieve for the stars.
In 1901, Smith married Lucretia Reynolds, a journalist for a every day newspaper in the Bay Region.
Smith pulled in a huge fortune of $180,000 via his investments as an oil stockbroker. His house (crafted shortly soon after his…