| Reuel Colt Gridley | |
|---|---|
Gridley with his sack of flour in 1864 |
|
| Born | January 23, 1829 |
| Died | November 24, 1870 (aged 41) Stockton, California |
Reuel Colt Gridley (January 23, 1829 - November 24, 1870) was an American storekeeper who gained nationwide attention in 1864, when he repeatedly auctioned a plain sack of flour and raised over $250,000 for the United States Sanitary Commission, which provided aid to wounded American Civil War soldiers.
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In 1864, Gridley supported the Democratic candidate for mayor in Austin, Nevada, where he operated a grocery store. He made a bet with a Republican friend that the loser would carry a fifty-pound sack of flour through the town. He performed his punishment with the accompaniment of the town band, and at the end someone offered that the sack should be auctioned off to raise money for the Sanitary Fund, a new organization that aided disabled Civil War veterans. After finally selling for $250, the winner bidder rejected actually taking the sack, and it was auctioned repeated times until over $8,000 was raised. When nearby Virginia City heard of the event (and where young newspaper editor Mark Twain was working at the time), they invited Gridley to come there, which he did, leading off repeated auctions across the west and the United States, raising over $250,000.[1][2][3][4][5][6]
Twain told the story of the Gridley flour sack in his 1872 book Roughing It.[7][8]
In 1866, Gridley moved to Stockton, California, but was in poor health, and he died in 1870.
In Austin, Gridley's store still stands and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2003.
In 1887, the "Reuel Colt Gridley Monument" was dedicated in Stockton's Rural Cemetery, depicting Gridley standing next to a large sack of flour.[3][9] In 1965, the monument was registered as a historical landmark by the state of California.[10]