Ozro W. Childs
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ozro Childs, a Protestant horticulturalist, was a founding father of The University of Southern California.[1]
Ozro W. Childs was born in Sutton (Caledonia County) Vermont, in 1824, and received his early education there. His father was a farmer; one of his grandfathers was a town minister. Like many young Vermonters, he left for the West, first for Ohio, where he earned his living as a schoolteacher. While there, he learned the tinsmith’s trade.
After the discovery of gold in California, he resolved to try his luck in the gold fields. He traveled down the Mississippi to New Orleans, and boarded a ship for Nicaragua; he crossed the Peninsula, where he and his fellow passengers endured great hardship, because the promised ship for California did not arrive. After some delay, he took another ship, and arrived in San Francisco in August, 1850, where he set off for the mines.
However, he did not know that central California is very foggy in the winter. The weather aggravated the asthma that would eventually kill him. So, he and a man named Hicks took a ship south, arriving in San Pedro. They walked from there into the small pueblo, and decided to set up a tinsmithing and hardware store. An existing merchant sold them his entire stock on credit. After a few years, he was able to buy out his partner, and eventually left the trade with $40,000 in his pocket. Not long afterward, he obtained the contract to build an extension of the zanja madre, to water the fields south of the pueblo. He was paid in land – all of what is now downtown Los Angeles from Sixth to Ninth, Main to Figueroa.
This was the foundation of his fortune. He built a substantial house at 10th and Main, then a half-mile from town, and on his property took up planting. In his day, he was Los Angeles’s most prominent nurseryman.
He also invested largely in land and civic improvements, often with Isaias W. Hellman as a partner. Their most long-term success was the Farmers and Merchants National Bank, which had some of the town’s most prominent citizens as investors. Their conservative lending practices allowed the bank to ride out every panic and depression. (Eventually it was bought by Security Pacific, which with various merges eventually became part of today’s Bank of America).
Los Angeles was a frontier town in the early 1870s, when a group of public-spirited citizens led by Judge Robert Maclay Widney first dreamed of establishing a university in the region. It took nearly a decade for this vision to become a reality, but in 1879 Widney formed a board of trustees and secured a donation of 308 lots of land from three prominent members of the community — Ozro W. Childs, former California governor John G. Downey, an Irish-Catholic pharmacist and businessman; and Isaias W. Hellman, a German-Jewish banker and philanthropist. The gift provided land for a campus as well as a source of endowment, the seeds of financial support for the nascent institution.
Childs died at his Main Street home in 1890, leaving 6 living children (out of 10) and a widow who survived him by over 40 years.
