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From the manuscript of 'Life
and History of Warren Eugene McCord' written in 1908/9 (pages 16 - 27)
Anthony Judson Hayward
was born in the city of Pittsburgh, on the 17th of March, in the year 1835,
and because of the age of his mother (who was a woman of great activity
and determination, and from whom he inherited these excellent qualities)
he was adopted into the McCord family. He was from his birth a somewhat
willful, active and energetic boy, quite nervous and hard to control, though
very affectionate and amiable to kind treatment, but needing a strong firm
hand to keep him in his proper place, and in the strong will power and
determined makeup of his father McCord, and in the tender loving care of
mother McCord, he fortunately fell into just the proper hands to make a
man of him.
His father McCord's
family living in the woods and far from any public school at the time of
his adoption he had very little chance to go to school, although he went
several terms to the academy at Richburg, but not being of a very studious
nature he was destined not to benefit to any great extent by book instruction,
but to get his education in the world of experience. He was a very apt
scholar in Nature's school, and picked up ideas readily, and from his father
McCord, whom he greatly admired, he absorbed all the details and learned
to manage the sawmill and logging business, and father McCord use to tell
with pride, that Jud, and Elisha and Darwin Sparks were the smartest boys
in that entire country to work, but that Jud had the brains and more good
common sense than all the others put together, and would someday be a rich
man. He had many escapades as a boy and young man, and had he been as liberally
supplied with money as are many young men, he would no doubt have come
to some bad end, but the hardship of poverty, together with the ruling
hand and determined manner of his benefactor, solved the problem in this
case and made him a successful man.
When the family moved
West, Mr. Hayward, then a boy of 19 years, took a job of putting in logs
for a company, and borrowed his uncle's oxen (he being a farmer and having
nothing for his teams to do through the winter season) but as it was a
poor winter he managed only to save money enough from his winter's work
(lacking ten schillings which he had borrowed from a friends) to buy his
ticket for the West, and in the Fall of 1855 he went West to Wisconsin
to where his father's family had moved. This first winter he worked
out by the month in the logging woods, and in the spring, when the rivers
broke up, he hired out to go upon the drives and worked all summer long,
helping to run logs up and down the river and raft them out, and when he
was discharged in the fall, his employer did not have any money to pay
him for his summer's work, so he started for home on foot, and without
a penny in his pocket. He had a fairly good looking suit of clothes, but
a very poor looking hat, and while going along the road he found a dollar
gold piece in the road and soon after met a man wearing a pretty good looking
hat and traded off his old hat to the man and gave him the dollar gold
piece to boot. Later on that fall he and his father McCord went down to
where the man lived for whom Mr. Hayward had worked all summer, and all
they could get out of him was a pair of oxen, which they drove home with
them, and with this yoke of oxen they did some work about town and worked
them in the woods that winter hauling in logs from father McCord's homestead
claim, and these logs they had sold for $5.00 per thousand feet, but when
they had delivered them, this being 1857, the good old Democratic free-trade
times had brought on another spell of hard times, the man was only able
to take one-half of them, this giving them enough to pay off their hired
help, and the balance of the logs they sold for $2.50 per thousand feet
and had to take the pay for them out of his store.
That fall Mr. Hayward
took up a pre-emption timber claim, which was somewhat similar to our stone
and timber claims now, inasmuch as it required residence, but there was
nothing to pay for them, whereas for the timber claims now we have to pay
$2.50 per acre. The logs from this claim he and his father sold to be delivered
to parties in Fond du Lac (Wisconsin) for $2.50 per thousand feet, and
even at this price, by putting in their own time, and working hard on that
winter's work, they made some money.
The next winter Mr.
Hayward worked for himself and in the spring we was elected treasurer of
the new town of Shawno, which office he held for two successive terms,
and gave good satisfaction.
In the spring of
1861 the Town Board laid out a road from Shawno to Green Bay, some 38 miles
on a direct line through the unbroken wilderness, and hired Mr. Hayward
to take charge of this work, and build the road for them, which he did.
Along the line of this new road about 19 miles out from the Village of
Shawno, was a very fine tract of white pine timber all vacant government
land, on which Mr. Hayward kept his eye, and two years later when it had
been surveyed, he took his blanket on winter day and went out as far as
this timber on the stage coach, which then ran from Shawno to Green Bay.
When he got to this land it was snowing some, and nearly dark, and almost
before he could gather up stuff and start a fire, the wolves began to howl
around him, and although he was all alone he camped out and gave the timber
a close examination, and then returned to town and got one, Marshall Morse,
who was a storekeeper in a small way in Shawno, and had some money, to
go in with him and buy up the timber. They got it at the government price
of $1.25 per acre.
Mr. Hayward, had,
the previous summer, become engaged to be married to a young lady in Oshkosh,
and the wedding day had been set. As soon as he secured this timber, Jud
in company with one Welcome Hyde from Appleton who was a partner with Henry
Hewitt, Jr., in many of his timber deals, and said to be the best woodsmen
then in the State of Wisconsin - went up on the headwaters of the Wolf
River, and from there crossed over into Marquette County, Michigan, to
look over a large tract of Government land, which Hyde said he would get
parties to enter for them on the halves, and they would thus make a big
lot of money, if they could get the minutes, that is, get the estimates
showing who much timber the lands contained. They employed Indians to go
with them to do the packing and carry the heavy part of their outfits with
dogs and sledges, and the trip became so hard on account of deep snow that
all the Indians deserted them, and they has so very little to eat that
Mr. Hyde completely gave out, and only by Mr. Hayward's help did he manage
to get out of the woods alive, and it was Hyde, who begged Hayward to save
himself and leave him behind as he did not think that both could get out
alive, but Jud stuck by him, for who ever knew him to desert a friend under
any circumstances, and they finally came to an Indian encampment where
Jud left Hyde to recuperate, and he went on home to be in tine for the
wedding day, as the time was very short, and he knew his fiancée
and her people would be worrying about his absence. On this trip it was
Greek meet Greek, for Mr. Hyde has told the writer that Jud Hayward was
the first and only man who ever did him up on a woods trip, and that he
had the greatest will-power and the most grit of any man he had ever met
before or since.
Jud was married on
May 31, 1866, to Martha Elizabeth Bowron, daughter of Joseph Bowron, a
well-to-do and much respected farmer in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
In the summer of
1866 Mr. Hayward and Mr. Morse built a sawmill to manufacture timber they
had acquired on the road from Shawno to Green Bay, which Mr. Hayward operated
the until the following spring, when he sold his interest and moved to
Manistee, Michigan, and in the company with Russell & Leach of Oshkosh,
built another sawmill, which the following year they sold out to some Chicago
parties, and Mr. Hayward moved back again to the city of Oshkosh.
In 1869 there was
to be a Government sale of lands on the Chippewa River, and Mr. Hayward
spent time during the winter of 1868 and 1869 and the summer up until the
time of the sale, looking over this timber, and when the sale came one,
in company with the Honorable Philetus Sawyer, he bought a large tract
of this timber, and in the spring he went to Winona on the Mississippi
River and erected a sawmill with which to manufacture this timber into
lumber. This mill he operated until the summer of 1874, when he sold it
out to one Bennett. During the summer of 1874 he went up on the St. Louis
River above Duluth, and cruised for Government timberlands, but as it was
too early yet to begin to operate in the new territory he came back to
the Chippewa River and in company with his younger brother Warren E. McCord
(the writer), formed a co-partnership for the purpose of doing a general
logging and land business on the Chippewa River, and its tributaries, and
he moved his family to Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, and built a very fine
home there, where he resided until he moved to the new town of Hayward.
They followed this business until the summer of 1880, when he sold out
his interest to Laird-Norton Company, and went over onto the Namakagon
River, a tributary of the St. Croix, and built a small sawmill, and later
organized he North Wisconsin Lumber Company, with Laird-Norton Company,
R.L. McCormick and F. Weyerhaeuser. Mr. Hayward then got the state to organize
a new county, and gave it the name of Sawyer, after the Honorable Philetus
Sawyer, then U.S. Senator, with one township organization, which he had
named Hayward, and located the county seat of said county at a place which
he had picked out for his town site, and where they afterward built their
new mills and town, which became so well and favorably known all through
the Middle West.
In 1884 iron, in
paying quantities, was found was to exist on the Gogebic Range, East of
the town of Ashland, in Wisconsin, and also on the Mesabi Range north of
Duluth, in Minnesota, and Mr. Hayward was largely interested in both of
these places. He organized mining companies and opened up large iron mines
on the Gogebic Range in the northern peninsula of Michigan, known as the
Nimicon, Cokogon, Ironton and Palms. He was offered $250,000 for his stock
in one of these, and could probably have sold his entire interest at one
time during the great boom of the iron mines for $1,250,000, but like almost
all the other holders of iron mining stock, still held for a higher price
until the boom went down, and save only about $10,000 that he got of his
stock in the Palms mine, did not clean up very much money.
In 1887 he sold out
his interest in the North Wisconsin Lumber Company to Mr. Weyerhaeuser,
and in 1890 after the boom had flattened out the iron mines, he moved with
is family to Tacoma, Washington. Here he organized a state bank with a
capital stock of $250,000 most of the stockholders being eastern men and
old acquaintances of Mr. Hayward's, and business associates. He then began
to buy up timber for account of himself and Mr. William Bradley of Wisconsin,
who had arranged to furnish money for Mr. Hayward with which to buy timberlands
on shares, Mr. Hayward one-fourth and Mr. Bradley three-fourths interest.
Mr. Hayward had gotten
a young man out from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to act as cashier of the bank
he had started in Tacoma, and while Mr. Hayward was in the East cleaning
up some business matters, this young man made some poor loans, and when
Mr. Hayward came back, and checked up on his work, and found how matters
stood, it worked so on the young man's mind that he went out and committed
suicide by cutting his own throat. Mr. Hayward then put his son-in-law
Mr. Alfred Eastman, in as cashier, and they then ran along until they could
get things I shape, and then liquidated and every depositor got his money
back in full, and the stockholders got back 67% of their money, and as
they were all well-to-do people it did them no very great harm, and no
blame was ever attached to Mr. Hayward in connection with the matter. About
this same time he organized a bank at Everett, Washington, of which he
was President. This was a National Bank. He also got a young man from Milwaukee
to act as cashier, and he made so many poor loans and at just this time
(1893), the time when the good old Democratic free-trade or hard times
came on to the country again; that they deeded it advisable to close the
bank, but it paid back dollar for dollar to both depositors and stockholders.
The hard time of
1893 affected the coast states more disastrously than it did the East,
and values in all lines of business shrank to more than one-half their
original worth and as Mr. Hayward had invested largely in all kinds of
property along the coast, it caught him as well as almost everybody doing
any kind of business, and made it a very hard struggle for him to keep
his head above the currents for a long term of years, and not until about
1900 did get begin to get on his feet, as it were, and again to feel less
worried as to the future welfare of himself and his family.
In the summer and
fall of 1889 he organized a party, purchased a small steamboat and outfit
of provisions and started for the Klondike in the northern part of Alaska
where gold had been discovered, and everybody who could get there was going
in search of gold. Mr. Hayward's party went too far north, in fact clear
up to the Saskatchewan coast and there became frozen in for a long time,
during which time Mr. Hayward was taken ill scurvy, brought on by living
on too much salt and not enough vegetables, and they were all compelled
to depend on the Esquimoux for food for some time, and he would have died
had it not been for one moan who stuck by him, and brought him home, where
he finally recovered his health and was as robust as ever again, but he
had not regained the money that it had cost him to make this trip, still
he got a lot of experience out of it, which he contented himself with as
well as he could, and no one ever heard him do any great amount of kicking
about it.
He then in the company
of Henry Hewitt, Jr. and others organized a mining company and opened a
copper mine near the British line, and his son-in-law is now manager of
that and is doing fairly well at it, and Mr. Hayward's stock is bringing
him in about $4,000 a year.
He next organized
an iron mine and is a stockholder and director in that, and getting a fair
income from it. He then reorganized a clay pipe works down at Little Falls,
Washington, with R.L. McCormick and Henry Hewitt, Jr. and others, and is
president of that company, and this is also paying something now.
He also has timber
holdings with the Bradley estate, of which his quarter interest is worth
$150,000 and becoming more valuable all the while, and has some individual
holding of timber under laid with coal which is worth something like $50,000,
besides a water power that is liable to be quite valuable in time to come.
He has a very fine house and large plat of ground at the head of one of
the principle streets in the city of Tacoma, and some other small lots
of property scattered about, so that he is probably worth in the neighborhood
of $250,000 and although a man now nearly of 74 he is still hale and hearty
and capable of living many years yet to enjoy, with reflection, the happy
consequent upon a well spent life. He leaves the greater part of his business
matters to his son Myron (named for his brother, Myron McCord, who Mr.
Hayward thought as much of and admired greatly as any person in the world)
who is a very steady, capable, honest and upright young man, doing, with
the help of his father, a large business in buying and selling logs, lumber,
cedar poles, fence posts and boom stuff, and also to his son-in-law Mr.
Alfred Eastman, another capable and honest man.
Of Mr. Hayward's
achievements his friends and relatives may well feel proud. He is a prominent
Free Mason, having taken all the degrees from that of 'Entered Apprentice
to Noble of the Mystic Shrine, inclusive, and lives up to the teachings
of the Order; is a man of high principles, indomitable pluck and well-known
fidelity. His integrity has never been questioned, and his business ability
has been far above average. He can count his friends by the score and is
sincerely loved by all who know him intimately. He had done well by his
father's teachings, and has never once brought disgrace upon the name.
He has raised a family of three children, all good, honest, well behaved,
and has reason to feel very proud of his descendants, as his father before
him, to whose memory Mr. Hayward has always given just and deserving praise.
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