J. B. Glover, of Redlands, was born in Benton County, Missouri, June 29, 1842.
His father, Rev. M. W. Glover, was born near Louisville, Kentucky, and was for many years a traveling preacher in the Methodist Episcopal Church South. He married Miss Elizabeth Osborn, also born near Louisville, and they subsequently moved to Benton County, Missouri. In 1850 he came to California and worked in the quartz mines in Amador County. In 1855 he went back to Missouri, and in the autumn of the same year brought his family, via the Isthmus, to California. In this same year he joined the Pacific Conference, and was assigned to Macedonia Circuit, in Sonoma County, and traveled that circuit three years. He was then sent to a circuit in Mendocino County, and was there three years. In 1868 he was sent as a missionary to San Bernardino, where he remained four years. He was then sent to Los Angeles for one year and then back to San Bernardino for two years. His next and last appointment was in San Luis Obispo, where he built a church, and, one year after, took a superannuated relation, on account of declining health. He died April 7, 1877, five years later, having spent the best part of his life as an active, earnest, itinerant minister of the Gospel.
The subject of this sketch was thirteen years old when he came to California with his parents. At the age of sixteen years he began learning the blacksmith trade, and served an apprenticeship of two years, and having earned a little money he went to school for a year in Sonoma County, at Pleasant Hill School. He then worked for wages on a farm until he was twenty-one years of age. At this time he married Miss Elizabeth A. McGuire, a native also of Missouri, a daughter of Cornelius McGuire, who crossed the plains to California when she was but seven years of age.
After his marriage Mr. Glover rented land in Sonoma County for two years, and then went to Mendocino County, and from there to San Bernardino County in 1869 where he pre-empted 160 acres of land, located in Lagonia. Here he endured all the hardships and privations of pioneer life. For the first three years during the summer months he had to haul water three miles that he used. Amid all these discouragements, however, he was not discouraged, and today he has a home surrounded by all the comforts of life, and is highly esteemed by all who know him.
He joined the Methodist Episcopal Church South in 1855, and has ever since been an earnest worker in the cause of Christianity. He has held all the offices in a church that a layman can hold, and is at present class-leader and steward of the church. He was superintendent of the Sunday school in San Bernardino for a period of nine years. He belongs to the Democratic party, but at the same time is a strong advocate of the temperance cause. Mr. and Mrs. Glover have had four children born to them, viz.: Ida M., Virginia L., Edwin M., and Anna K., who died in infancy.