Intelligence reaches us of the death of Abraham Schell, at his home at
Knight's Ferry, California, in the early part of February. Mr. Schell
was seventy-six years old, and was a native of this county, having been
born in the town of Wright. At the time of the gold excitement in 1849
he was in the mercantile business in Albany, but sold out and joining a
company of friends journeyed to California, where he invested his means
to good advantage and became highly successful, amassing a large
fortune. His vineyards and their product have long been celebrated. A
man of independent thought and fine literary attainments, he was one of
the sons of Schoharie county, whose enterprise and intellectual culture
we may take just pride in.
His remains are deposited in a vault there, to be brought here in the
spring by his nephew, and interred in their final resting place in the
cemetery at Middleburgh, where he has a $2,000 monument erected.
We learn from Dr. Knower that the proposed monument to his nephew at Old
Stone Fort will undoubtedly be erected, as it has been contracted for,
but the full details he will not be posted on until the arrival of the
nephew in the spring.
The above will show that death, which plays an important hand in the
events of human life, intervened; so I have gone on alone and submit it
to the public, such as it is. I hope and trust it may meet the approval
of all Californians, more particularly of those of the days to which it
refers. If they will give their approval, it will add to the happiness
and gratification of one of their compatriots of those early days of the
pioneers and founders of the State of California. What California has
become since, we, at that time, had no realization of. Instead of
conceiving it an utter impossibility of ever building one railroad
across the continent, we now have five. Instead of conceiving the idea
that it would never be an agricultural country, it may be said to be the
vineyard and wine producing country of the world, and it has a greater
variety of productions than most any other land.
The city of San Francisco, when I first entered it, had not as many good
buildings as a common eastern village. Now it has a population of
nearly four hundred thousand, and edifices that cost millions. It has
produced more millionaires, from persons that went there poor, than any
other country before in the history of the world, and more money has
been donated to science and education by those successful pioneers, who
were the creators of their own fortune in the same time, than all the
rest of the world in the past forty-five years, since the days of the
Forty-niners.
Lick's institution for the science of astronomy, Leland Stanford's
twenty millions to the Alto University of Learning, open to all
students, are illustrations of the above statements.
The foundation of the fortunes of many bankers and wealthy capitalists
of the East were made in California in the days of the Forty-niners.
Mill, the owner of the great building at the corner of Broadway and Wall
street, the ground on which it stands costing a million, who is many
times a millionaire, went from Sing Sing, in this State, a poor boy in
1849. Armour, the great millionaire cattle dealer of Chicago, made his
first money there in those days, which laid the foundation of his great
fortune, and many others I can recall to mind too numerous to mention.
While all did not succeed, as they never do in any human enterprise,
some got discouraged, others fell by the way and laid down and died from
disappointment, yet others more than realized their most fabulous
conception of wealth. I was told when I was a boy if I went where the
sun set and dug for gold I would find it. When I became a man I went
three thousand miles in the direction of the sun setting and dug and
found gold. It is not a dream, for as I close this writing I see on my
little finger a gold ring made from the gold I there dug, which has been
there for forty-five years. It is so fine that it has been wearing away,
and it is not more than one-fourth the size it was when I first put it
on, and time is likewise wearing on me, and it will probably last as
long as I do, and we will disappear together, as Shakespeare says,
"besmeared with sluttish time."