James McMillan Shafter

He went to work as a lawyer in Townsend, Vermont, where he remained for three years before moving to Burlington, Vermont.^[1] While living in Townsend, he was elected to the Vermont House of Representatives in 1841, and he was then elected Secretary of State of Vermont, serving from 1842 until resigning in the summer of 1849, in order to seek out new opportunities in the west.^[5][6]

In 1850, he first moved to Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and was elected to the Wisconsin State Assembly in 1851. During the 1852 legislative session, Shafter served as speaker of the Assembly.^[7] In the fall of 1852, he was the Whig Party nominee for United States House of Representatives in Wisconsin's 3rd congressional district, but he lost that election to Democrat John B. Macy.^[8]

In 1855, he then moved to San Francisco, California, where he practiced law with his brother, Oscar L. Shafter.^[4][9] In 1857, a complex real estate litigation resulted in the Shafter firm winning a victory for their client of 75,000 acres of farm land at Point Reyes in Marin County.^[10] The client sold the property to the Shafters.^[11] They leased it to dairy farmers who provided milk and butter to an ever-growing San Francisco and prospered.^[12] The Shafter families owned most of Point Reyes from 1857 to 1919, when the land was sold in parcels.^[13]

In 1862, Shafter served in the California State Senate and was its President pro tempore.^[14] Shafter also served in the California Constitution Convention of 1878 and was on the University of California Board of Regents ex officio as President of the California State Agricultural Association. In November 1885, he was appointed one of the original trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University.^[15][4][16]

In March 1888, Shafter survived a gunshot at close range.^[17] His son, Dr. James Shafter, had sued for a divorce and the wife's brother, angry at the proceedings, confronted the elder Shafter in the San Francisco City Hall.^[18] The brother fired four times at point blank range but missed his mark.^[17]

In 1889, Governor Robert Waterman appointed Shafter as judge of the San Francisco County Superior Court to fill the vacancy from the resignation of Jeremiah F. Sullivan.^[19][20][21] Near the time of his death, his large dairy ranch in Marin County, California, was described as one of the largest ranches in the world—over 23,000 acres.^[1]

In 1845, James McMillan Shafter married Julia Granville Hubbard (September 11, 1821 – February 11, 1871) in Montpelier, Vermont, who had studied at Troy Female Seminary.^[22] They had at least four children: Payne Jewett Shafter,^[23] James Chester Shafter, Chester Hubbard Shafter, and Julia Ruth Shafter.^[24]

At the time of his death, in 1892, Shafter left an estate worth about $1,000,000 (about $33,000,000 adjusted for inflation to 2023).