George W. Sponable horticulturist at Fullerton, was born in Eden, Seneca County, Ohio, November 3, 1825. His parents, Christopher and Sarah (Lawrence) Sponable, were natives respectively of New York and Vermont, and of German and English origin.
George W., the third of his parents’ eleven children, started in business for himself in 1849, by coming to California. His father had moved in 1836 to McHenry County, Illinois, where he was an extensive farmer until his death in 1854.
Mr. Sponable followed mining and lumbering in California from 1849 to 1855, and then returned to Illinois, where he followed farming until 1879. He then moved to Nuckolls County, Nebraska, and bought 480 acres of land, which he cultivated until 1883, when he again made his advent to the Golden State and bought a fruit ranch a mile and a half northeast of Anaheim, and there he is spending the last years of his life in the pleasures of horticulture.
Mr. Sponable fought for the Union three years. Entering Company A, Ninety-fifth Illinois Volunteer Infantry, as corporal, he was at the battles of Vicksburg and Guntown, Mississippi, and in the expedition against Shreveport, etc. At Vicksburg he was wounded. He was discharged as a Sergeant, at Springfield, Illinois, in 1865. He is now a member of Malvern Hill Post, No. 131, G. A. R., of which he has been Quartermaster two years.
He has been married three times; first, in Illinois, in 1857, to Miss Anna Washburn, a native of New York State, by whom he had one daughter, Georgiana, new Mrs. Ed. Peitz, of Irving Park, Illinois. Mrs. Sponable died in June, 1865, and in 1869 Mr. Sponable married Miss Ella West, also from New York State. She died in 1871, and Mr. Sponable was again married in 1872, this time to Mrs. Sophia Huntington, who was born in New York, the daughter of Stephen Emery. By her first bus-husband she had two children: Emery and Julia; the latter is the wife of Orson Knowlton, of Anaheim.
