Dalzell, Charles A

From Lane Co Oregon

Charles A. Dalzell, secretary-treasurer of the Elmira Lumber Company of Eugene has made his home in Lane County since 1907. He is well known in connection with timber and lumber interests throughout the state and is considered an authority in those matters. He was born in Monmouth, Warren County, Illinois, December 13, 1858, and is a son of Joseph and Eliza (Conner) Dalzell. His paternal grandparents were from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the maternal grandparents from Washington County in the same state. In 1833 his grandfather, Samuel Connor, emigrated westward to Illinois. Joseph Dalzell spent all his life from early youth upon a farm near Monmouth, Illinois.

Charles A. Dalzell pursued his education in the public schools of Warren County, Illinois, and in a business college there and afterward went to Davenport, Iowa, in 1880. He remained in Davenport for twenty- one years, or until 1901, when he came westward to Oregon, settling first in Portland, where he was the manager of the Spicer-Dalzell Milling Company. In 1907 he came to Eugene with this company. The Elmira Lumber Company, of which he is now secretary-treasurer, is the outgrowth of a wholesale and retail business which was established at Elmira, Oregon, in 1900 by J. W. Walters and his son. They still have a mill at Elmira, where forty people are employed. In 1907 the company was incorporated under its present name, with F.C. Walters as president and Charles A. Dalzell as secretary-treasurer. In that year they opened a lumber yard in Eugene and another at Irving for retail business. The company has about twenty-nine hundred acres of timber land and manufactures all building materials, their output amounting to about six million feet annually. They ship to California and to Utah and they are now building a small mill on the Noti where the new railroad is being constructed.

In 1888 Mr. Dalzell was united in marriage to Miss Grace Smith, a daughter of H. H. Smith, of Davenport, Iowa, and they have one son, Harold Alden, who is a graduate of the University of Oregon of the class of 1910, and is now state secretary of the Young Men's Christian Association for Oregon and Idaho. The parents and their son are members of the Presbyterian church, Mr. Dalzell serving as superintendant of the Sunday School.

[From the The Centennial History of Oregon 1811-1912, Volume II published by The S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, Chicago, 1912. "Charles A. Dalzell," p. 153]

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