Abraham Dubois Starr (1830-1894): Contra Costa Supervisor and Flour Mill Operator

 

Abraham Dubois Starr & his flour mill

Plot 14B, Lot 221

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when California’s economy was still grinding itself into form, Abraham Dubois Starr stood at the junction of agriculture, industry, and public life—one of the men who turned wheat into wealth and shoreline into infrastructure.

Born in 1830, Starr arrived in California during its formative years and quickly distinguished himself not as a speculator, but as a manufacturer. In South Vallejo, Contra Costa County, along the Carquinez Strait, he built what became one of the most important flour-milling operations on the Bay: Starr Flour Mills, operated by Starr & Co.

Starr Family Plot

The scale was immense for its time. By the 1870s and 1880s, Starr’s mills were capable of producing hundreds of barrels of flour per day, much of it exported by ship to San Francisco and beyond. Wheat arrived from inland farms by wagon and rail; finished flour departed by water, feeding the rapidly growing population of Northern California and supplying coastal trade. Period engravings show a fully integrated industrial complex—mills, warehouses, wharves, rail lines, and steam stacks—an early example of California’s transition from frontier agriculture to export-driven industry.

Starr’s importance extended beyond commerce. He served on the Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors, helping govern a county still defining its civic institutions. In that role, he represented the interests of an emerging industrial class—men whose businesses depended on roads, ports, taxation policy, and stability. Newspapers of the era referred to him as a leading businessman and pioneer merchant, language reserved for those whose influence was both economic and political.

Yet the public success of Abraham Starr concealed a private life marked by long, grinding sorrow.

His wife, Kate Calkin Starr, suffered a severe mental illness that persisted for years and became a matter of public record in an age with little discretion or compassion. Newspapers chronicled her condition with stark language, framing it as tragedy rather than illness. Starr devoted himself to her care, withdrawing gradually from the active management of his business as her condition worsened. As one obituary would later remark with grim poetry, his strength diminished as her reason returned.

By the time Abraham Dubois Starr died in December 1894, the industrial world he helped build was already beginning to move past the era of individual proprietors toward corporations and consolidation. His mills continued; his prominence did not. The fortune he created thinned with time, absorbed by changing markets and family necessity.

His death was front-page news. The Oakland Enquirer and San Francisco Chronicle devoted lengthy columns to his life, pairing praise for his industrial achievements with somber reflections on domestic sacrifice. A woodcut portrait accompanied the coverage: Starr heavily bearded, eyes steady, the face of a man accustomed to responsibility.

He was buried with his family, his name now one among many carved into stone—merchant, supervisor, husband, father—his empire reduced to memory, illustration, and newsprint.

Today, the Starr Flour Mills are gone, the shoreline altered, the smoke long dispersed. But for a crucial span of California’s growth, Abraham Dubois Starr helped feed a region and shape a county, leaving behind a legacy measured not only in barrels of flour, but in the quiet cost of endurance.

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Sources

Oakland Enquirer, Dec. 24, 1894; San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 25, 1894; period engravings of Starr Flour Mills (South Vallejo); Facebook: Contra Costa History page; Find a Grave

John Lewis Bromley (1820–1909): Mexican–American War Veteran, Pioneer, and Civic Leader

Plot 16, Lot 64 

John Lewis Bromley was a veteran of the Mexican–American War, an early California pioneer, and a respected civic figure whose public service spanned the formative decades of California statehood. Through military service, county leadership, and participation in Oakland’s early municipal development, Bromley belonged to a generation that helped transform California from a distant frontier into a functioning American state.

Bromley was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1820, and came of age during a period of rapid American territorial expansion. As a young man, he entered military service during the Mexican–American War (1846–1848), serving as an orderly sergeant in Company G, 14th United States Infantry.

The Mexican–American War proved decisive for the future of the American West. Sparked by disputes over Texas and U.S. ambitions to reach the Pacific, the conflict ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, under which Mexico ceded nearly half its territory—including California—to the United States. In California, U.S. naval and ground forces quickly secured key ports and towns, allowing American civil government to follow close behind military occupation.

Veterans of this war, including Bromley, would later play outsized roles in California’s early civic institutions, their service lending credibility and leadership in a newly organized society.

In 1850, shortly after California’s admission to the Union, Bromley relocated west and settled in Contra Costa County near the current city of Clayton. There, he became deeply involved in local governance at a time when counties were responsible for nearly all public administration, from law enforcement to infrastructure and judicial functions.

Bromley served as a justice of the peace and as a county supervisor, positions that placed him at the center of legal and political life during the county’s early years.  

By the later nineteenth century, Bromley had become a resident of Oakland, where he remained an engaged and visible public figure. 
Although surviving documents do not enumerate his specific role line-by-line, Bromley is historically associated with the generation of leaders who shaped Oakland’s early charter and municipal framework, helping define how the young city would govern itself during its transition from a small town to a major urban center.

An 1887 editorial in the Martinez News-Gazette reflects both his public reputation and his intellectual engagement, referring to Bromley as an “old friend” of Contra Costa County and a respected Oakland citizen who actively participated in regional historical and civic discussions—even debating the proper naming and historical interpretation of Mount Diablo itself.

Bromley remained closely connected to his fellow veterans throughout his life. He was a trustee of the Associated Veterans of the Mexican War and helped found the Pioneer Society of Alameda County, organizations dedicated to preserving both the memory of early California and the bonds formed during wartime service .

He also served as president of the Sloat Monument Association, honoring Commodore John D. Sloat, whose 1846 declaration of U.S. sovereignty in California marked a turning point in the state’s history.
Importantly, Bromley’s close friendship with Major Edward A. Sherman is now clearly documented. The two men served together during the Mexican–American War and remained intimate friends for decades afterward. Sherman, described as a man of “unquestionable integrity, honest, honorable and reliable,” later served as president of the Associated Mexican War Veterans, reinforcing the enduring bond between the two men forged in wartime and sustained through public service.

Bromley Family Plot (photo Don Bromley)

Major Sherman also served as a pallbearer at Bromley’s funeral, a final public testament to their long friendship and shared history .

John Lewis Bromley died on November 7, 1909, at his home at 483 Merrimac Street in Oakland, at the age of 88 . His death was attributed to complications of advanced age, and contemporaries noted that sorrow over the death of his wife earlier that year had weighed heavily upon him.

John Lewis Bromley’s life reflects the arc of 19th-century California itself: war, migration, settlement, and civic construction. As a soldier, county official, Oakland civic leader, and veterans’ advocate, he helped lay the institutional and moral groundwork for the communities that followed. His name survives not only in records and memorials, but in the enduring civic traditions of the East Bay he helped shape.

Sources: Oakland Enquirer (Nov. 8 & 9, 1909); Martinez News-Gazette (Oct. 29, 1887); U.S. Army service records (Mexican–American War); Contra Costa County public records; Oakland municipal history; Find A Grave memorial for John Lewis Bromley. 

General John Heuston [Hewston] (1825-1900): From Millions to Misery After Killing Man With Umbrella

Plot 2, Grave 295

There are lives that rise like mountains and fall like avalanches, and among them none was more extraordinary—or more scandal-scarred—than that of General John Heuston, once counted among the master builders of California’s mineral empire, and later whispered of in London police courts as a killer armed with nothing more than an umbrella.

In the roaring decades after the Gold Rush, Heuston stood astride the Pacific Coast like a colossus. A mining engineer of uncommon reputation, he helped tame the wild wealth of California’s mountains, assessed fortunes, advised syndicates, and built a name so solid that governments trusted him with their most delicate enterprises. He moved easily among the architects of California’s fortune, counted as a personal friend of Leland Stanford himself, and stood within the inner circle of men whose wealth and will shaped the destiny of the state.

Sent west by the United States itself, he oversaw the construction of the first U.S. Mint in San Francisco—an iron vault for a restless state drunk on gold.

Commemorative Coin & San Francisco Mint around Heuston era

Money followed power, and power followed ambition. He co-founded one of the great mining firms of the age, moved easily among capitalists and politicians, and wore the honorary title of “General” with the confidence of a man accustomed to command. He was active in the Vigilance Committee that once ruled San Francisco by rope and decree, marched with the National Guard, dined with the city’s elite, and left his mark on clubs, lodges, and political councils across California.

Then came the blow that crossed an ocean.

In 1894, London awoke to a sensation that crackled across the Atlantic wires: General John Heuston jailed—an American magnate charged with killing a man. The weapon, of all things, was an umbrella—wielded in a sudden, fatal altercation that left one man dead and a California titan locked behind English bars. Newspapers feasted on the irony. A builder of empires undone by a street quarrel. A general reduced to a prisoner.

Though the affair eventually faded from the courts, it never faded from his name.

The years that followed were unkind. Fortune, once obedient, turned feral. Bad ventures gnawed away at his wealth. Investments soured. Properties slipped from his grasp. The man who once evaluated mines worth millions found himself forced into quiet retirement, his grand career reduced to memories and clippings yellowing in scrapbooks.

By the time death came in 1900, it found Heuston far from the glitter of San Francisco, living modestly, dependent on care, his once-vast means long exhausted. The newspapers, so quick to trumpet his triumphs and disgrace, now reported his passing with solemn restraint: a prominent Californian called by grim death.

He left behind a legend impossible to simplify. Engineer and empire-builder. Vigilante and gentleman. Prisoner of London law. A man who rose with California itself and fell, as California so often does, by the violent swing of fate.

His son, having moved East, met a sudden and violent end in a fox-hunting accident after being thrown from a horse—another quiet calamity in a family already marked by reversal. 

In the end, General John Heuston belonged to that restless breed the West creates and destroys in equal measure—men too large for quiet lives, whose shadows stretch long after the body is laid in the ground.

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Sources: Oakland Tribune, May 31, 1894 · San Francisco Call, August 18, 1900 · Oakland Enquirer, August 18, 1900

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Obediah Summers (1845–1896): Re-Interred Black Civil War Veteran

Obediah Summers, Sacramento Bee, 1889

Civil War Grand Army of the Republic plot

Obediah Summers was born enslaved in Kentucky in 1845. When the Civil War came, he escaped the South and joined the Union Army—one of the tens of thousands of Black men who wagered their lives on the dangerous idea that freedom could be seized, not granted. He survived the war, learned to read and write with ferocity, and reinvented himself in California as a minister, political force, and public speaker whose voice carried far beyond the pulpit.

By the 1870s and 1880s, Summers had become a leading figure in Black civic life in Northern California. He served as pastor of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, rose to Presiding Elder of the A.M.E. Church in California, and was appointed the first black chaplain of the California State Assembly in recognition of his political work and oratory. Newspapers described him—often with begrudging admiration—as “self-made,” a man who had clawed his way from slavery into prominence.

Summers also found himself at the center of a bitter and very public inheritance battle in 1889. When Eliza Scott, a Black woman who had amassed a considerable estate, died and named Summers her executor and beneficiary, the trustees of his own church sued him, claiming the money belonged to the congregation, not the man. The dispute dragged through the courts with what one paper described as “much spirit,” but Summers prevailed. 

He died suddenly in Oakland in March 1896, just fifty-one years old, reportedly from liver disease. 

At Mountain View Cemetery, Summers—Union Army veteran—was placed not with his fellow Civil War soldiers, but in the cemetery’s “unendowed” section, a potter’s field reserved for the poor. Over time, his grave was forgotten, his marker reduced to a modest stone that misspelled his name. The segregation he had escaped in life followed him, quietly, into death.

More than a century later, Oakland historian Dennis Evanosky and Summers’ descendants discovered the error. In 2004, after painstaking research and advocacy, Summers’ remains were exhumed and re-interred in the Grand Army of the Republic plot among other Civil War veterans—where he should have been all along. The ceremony was described as “righting a wrong,” a rare instance where the historical record was not merely corrected on paper, but physically amended in the earth.

The U.S. government provided an official military headstone under long-standing federal policy guaranteeing burial markers for honorably discharged veterans, regardless of race, rank, or ability to pay.  

Obediah Summers now rests among soldiers who fought the same war, under the same flag, for the same fragile promise of citizenship. 

Sources:
The Sacramento Bee (Oct. 19, 1889), “Obediah Has Won”; Marysville Democrat (Mar. 17, 1896), “Died at Oakland”; Oakland Tribune (Oct. 18, 2004), “Righting a Wrong / Oakland man fights for Civil War vet,” pp. 1 & 5; Mountain View Cemetery burial and re-interment records; United States Colored Troops service statistics (National Archives). 

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Black Soldiers in the Civil War

Approximately 180,000 Black men served in the Union Army and another 20,000 in the Union Navy, making up about 10 percent of all Union forces by the end of the war. Most served in segregated United States Colored Troops (USCT) units and were often paid less, given harsher labor, and denied promotions—but their service proved decisive in tipping the balance toward Union victory.

By contrast, only a few thousand Black men served the Confederacy, and nearly all did so as enslaved laborers—teamsters, cooks, fortification workers—rather than as recognized soldiers. Formal authorization for Black Confederate soldiers did not occur until March 1865, just weeks before the war ended, and resulted in almost no meaningful enlistment. The overwhelming historical record shows that Black military service in the Civil War was a Union phenomenon, driven by the pursuit of freedom and citizenship rather than loyalty to the Confederate cause.

Obediah Summers’ choice to escape slavery and fight for the Union placed him squarely within this larger, transformative movement—one that reshaped the meaning of American democracy, even when the nation struggled to honor it afterward.

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