Sutter County Biographies

Among the productive peach orchards in the vicinity of Yuba City is one of thirty acres owned and cultivated by Seely Cook, who has made his home on his ranch, four miles southwest of the city in the Walton tract. He was born at Vernon, N.J., September 3, 1871. His father was a farmer and a Civil War veteran. Seely Cook was reared on his father’s farm, and attended public school in the vicinity of his home until he was eighteen years old, when he came to California. His first job was as a ranch laborer on the Isaac A. Winship ranch at Meridian. By economy he saved the greater part of his wages, with which he purchased thirty-five acres of rich bottom land at Meridian, to which he later added ten acres. He farmed until 1913, when he sold out to the Alameda Sugar Company and bought his present home place in the Bogue district. This ranch was set to cling peaches, and is now highly productive. Mr. Cook has built a fine house, and the property is entirely free from debt.

Mr. Cook was united in marriage with Miss Mabel Winship, a daughter of Isaac A. Winship; and they are the parents of seven children: Gladys, the wife of George Leal and the mother of two children, Jean and Loyal; Irlene, the wife of J. Eugene Morrison and the mother of one daughter, Betty Jean; Cecil, deceased; and Doris, Ena Fay, June, and Seely, Jr.

GEORGE CORRELL

An experienced rancher, well-known in and beyond the Cranmore district, is George Correll, who was born at Downieville, Cal., on August 19, 1853, the son of Dominique and Virginia (Gainey) Correll, the former a pioneer who came to California in 1849 by way of Panama. He was a native of the province of Gascony, in France; and on making for the United States, he first came to New Orleans and then migrated westward to California. He went into the gold mines at Downieville, Sierra County, and soon afterward started a butcher shop; and the latter enterprise he maintained for some time. Mrs. Correll was a native of Louisiana, and was married to Mr. Correll in New Orleans. In 1852 she joined her husband in California, coming by way of Panama. George Correll was the first white child born in Downieville; and the next day after his birth a girl baby, Isabelle Ayres, also first saw the light there. There were four children in the family. George is the eldest; Anthony is in Sutter City; Mary Louise has become Mrs. Poffenberger, of Yuba City; and Theodore is in Sacramento. In 1860, Dominique Correll removed to Marysville, where he had a butcher shop for a year. On selling out, he removed to a farm near Kirksville on the Sacramento River; and there he died at the age of eighty-four, highly esteemed by all who knew him. His good wife passed away on the same ranch at the age of almost ninety-nine years.

George Correll attended school awhile for only two months out of each year; but eventually he went to Hesperian College in Woodland. Thereafter he was associated with his father on the home place of 440 acres until twenty-seven years ago, at which time he started in to farm for himself. He bought his present ranch of 179 acres, eight miles north of the old home-place, the ranch he now operates; and there he raises sheep, hogs, corn, barley and alfalfa.

At Sacramento, on September 12, 1904, Mr. Correll was married to Mrs. Mary Louise (Matlock) Thayer, a native of Calloway County, Mo. Her parents were William H. and Martha Ann (Slavens) Matlock; and her father was born and reared in Warren County, Ky., while her mother was born and brought up in Middleton, Montgomery County, Mo. Mr. Matlock was a farmer, and the father of eight children, among whom Mrs. Correll was the third in the order of birth. She attended a private school in Missouri, and accompanied her folks to California in the autumn of 1874, when they settled at Kirksville on the Sacramento River. And there, on the ranch they had so greatly improved, and where they had won the respect of their new neighbors, these worthy parents died, the father in his eighty-first year, the mother in her seventy-third. Before her marriage to Mr. Correll, Mrs. Correll was the widow of Daniel Sabin Thayer, a native of Oneida County, N.Y., who had come to California in 1852, had worked in the mines, and had settled in Sonoma County in the late fifties, and later still at Kirksville. He died October 14, 1884, at Kirksville, leaving his widow with two children, Harry M. and Daniel S. Thayer, both of Yuba City. Prior to her union with Mr. Thayer Mrs. Correll had been married to Jesse Davis, her first husband, by whom she had one son, William Spencer Davis, also now at Yuba City. Mr. Correll is a Democrat, while Mrs. Correll is a Republican–a contrasting difference in political views and support that helps to maintain a perfect “balance of power.”