George William Frost

Florence McMillan’s father, and a banker in California. Born at Heart Prairie, Wisconsin, in 1850; to Iowa with his parents; married Lucy Bell at Elkhorn in 1876; in 1880 a clerk in his father’s lumber yard at Harlan, Iowa, where Dora Belle was born. To California about 1883: in February 1884 a director of the new Cloverdale Banking and Commercial Company, then its cashier and secretary; treasurer of the Riverside Water Company in 1885; and in October 1886 cashier of the new City Bank of Santa Cruz (record). Lucy died at Santa Cruz in March 1887; that July the local paper reported a “pistol accident” involving him (not yet read), and by September he was gone from the bank.

He married Susie Myers at Cloverdale in 1888, was in Washington by 1892 and at Spokane by 1900, with his father living with him in 1910. In 1902 he was one of five men who bought 37,721 acres of railroad land in the Moxee valley near Yakima (source). He died at Tacoma in 1925. His mother and his first wife’s mother were Fairchild first cousins, so he and Lucy were second cousins (see Jonathan Fairchild).

Open questions

• The 1887 pistol accident, and why he left Santa Cruz; his business at Spokane, 1889-1920. The trees’ “Banker, Spokane Falls” has no support; his banking was in California.