James Pieronnet Pierce
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James Pieronnet Pierce (c. August 25, 1825 – 1897) was an American entrepreneur and early California pioneer.
James P. Pierce was born August 25, 1825 in Friendsville, Pennsylvania where he spent his early life, before moving west as a young adult. In Constantine, Michigan, he embarked on a career in General Merchandising. There he met Amelia Ann Pease, a native of Ann Arbor. The couple married on August 25, 1852, in Jackson, Michigan, when Pierce was twenty-seven and Pease was seventeen.
Two years later, in 1854, they came to California, reaching San Francisco, California by way of the Isthmus. Shortly after their arrival, they went to Yuba County, and at Smartsville, California Mr. Pierce engaged in hydraulic mining, becoming a leading operator before he sold out in 1878.[citation needed]
San Francisco sea wall
He might have continued uninterruptedly in that important field, had not the death of a brother-in-law, A. H. Houston, drawn him back to San Francisco to take charge of an entirely different enterprise. Mr. Houston, as early as 1867, had undertaken to build part of the seawall along the San Francisco waterfront, under contract with the board of state harbor commissioners, and when he died he had finished only a part of that great undertaking and had gone to great expense in quarrying and cutting granite. Mr. Pierce succeeded to Mr. Houston’s interests and completed 1130 feet of the new sea wall under a new and enlarged contract, receiving as his compensation $240 per linear foot.[citation needed]
Mining interests
From 1868, for seven or eight years, Mr. Pierce’s family lived in San Francisco, and during that time he established general offices there, although his main interests continued to be the exploitation of hydraulic mining properties in Yuba County, which he still operated for many years after finishing the sea wall. He continued to own and operate the Blue Gravel Mine, which was enlarged to include a water proposition and a large lot of land, and renamed it The Excelsior Water and Mining Company, under which title it was conducted until sold in 1881 to a syndicate composed of James Ben Ali Haggin & Lloyd Tevis, and others. His interest in this deal amounted to $600,000.[citation needed]
