Nathan Weston Blanchard, born in Madison, Maine in July 1831, came to Northern California during the Gold Rush in 1854. His failure to "strike it rich" in the gold fields first led him into the meat butchering business. Later, during the 1860’s, he settled in Dutch Flat, a Sierra Nevada gold mining boomtown in Placer County, and entered the lumber trade – a highly profitable business during this period of plentiful and hasty construction in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Blanchard was elected to the California legislature in 1861, and married Ann Elizabeth Hobbs in 1864. In 1872, after the death of their first child Dean, they moved to Ventura County. Blanchard’s success as a merchant enabled him and his partner Elisha Bradley, who remained in Northern California, to purchase 2,700 acres of the Rancho Santa Paula y Saticoy and recorded the townsite of Santa Paula on a portion of it in 1875.
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| Wallace Libbey Hardison, born in Caribou, Maine in August 1850, made his first trip to California at the age of nineteen, when he journeyed to Humboldt County to work in the lumber industry. He later joined his brothers in the Pennsylvania oil fields, where he became a successful oilman, was elected to the Pennsylvania legislature in 1880, married Clara McDonald and raised their three children. In 1883, Hardison and Lyman Stewart ventured to Los Angeles and Ventura counties to examine the prospects for oil production. The leases purchased on the trip were the foundation of the new Hardison and Stewart Oil Company. Hardison moved his family to Santa Paula in 1886. In 1890, the Hardison and Stewart Oil Company and several other small companies merged to become the Union Oil Company. Continually eager to take on new ventures, Hardison teamed with Nathan Blanchard the following year and purchased land to raise citrus. Hardison encouraged many of his relatives to move to California and involved them in his businesses. Two of the most prominent family members to prosper in Santa Paula were Hardison’s nephews Charles Collins Teague and A.C. Hardison. |
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