Los Angeles County CA Archives Biographies.....Watkeys, Luther C. 1854 - 
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Joy Fisher sdgenweb@yahoo.com January 1, 2006, 11:28 pm

Author: Luther A. Ingersoll (1908)

LUTHER C. WATKEYS, the Santa Monica Superintendent of the Land and Water
Company, was born at Rochester, New York, September 18th, 1854. His father,
Henry Watkeys, was superintendent of motive power for the New York Central
Railroad Company, holding this office for a period of thirty-three years. He was
a native of Nova Scotia. The major portion of his life, barring ten years from
1885 to 1895 in Indiana, was spent in New York. He was, by profession,
mechanical engineer and an expert in his line. He had the personal confidence of
William H. Vanderbilt and was frequently called to consult with him upon
business matters. Mr. Watkeys had an older brother who was thirty-five years an
engineer of the N. Y. C. Ry. Company and died without warning while on duty in
his engine cab. Mr. Watkeys' mother was Miss Zerriah T. Colman, a native of
Newburyport, Mass., and a daughter of Luther Colman. Young Watkeys left home in
1875, at the age of twenty-one years, and became a civil engineer. Later he
entered the employ of the N. Y. C. Ry. Company and for eleven years served as
passenger conductor, running between New York and Rochester. He came West to
Indiana in 1887, and to Kalamazoo, Mich., in 1892. In 1895 he came to California
and engaged in orange culture at Covina. In 1904, he assumed his present
position and is known to the citizens of Santa Monica as a most competent and
popular manager of the important interests he represents.

Mr. Watkeys married in 1892, Miss May Florence Pickard of Kalamazoo, Mich., a
daughter of J. H. Pickard, a California pioneer of 1849, who spent several years
in the state as a successful miner, and returned to Kalamazoo, Mich., where he
died about 1892.


Additional Comments:
Extracted from:

Ingersoll's century history, Santa Monica Bay cities: prefaced with a brief
history of the state of California, a condensed history of Los Angeles County,
1542 to 1908: supplemented with an encyclopedia of local biography and
embellished with views of historic landmarks and portraits of representative
people.

Los Angeles: Luther A. Ingersoll (1908)


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