1921 Duluth & St Louis County MN, Van Brunt.pdf - Garon.us

820 DULUTH AND ST. LOUIS COUNTY
chant from comparatively small and humble beginnings. He had the
ability to work hard and consecutively, possessed ambition, good judgment,
and twenty odd years have been sufficient for the achievement
of a commendable record.
Mr. Persons was born in Sweden December 23, 1881, and was about
four years of age when in 1885 he came to this country with his parents,
G, C. and Mary (Anderson) Persons. His father established his home
in Duluth and continued to follow his trade as a carpenter until his
death in 1898. All the three children are still living, Charles A. being
the second in age.
Mr. Persons graduated from the Lincoln grade school at Duluth in
1895, and continued his education in the Duluth High School until 1897.
In the meantime he had learned much of practical business, having carried
a paper route for seven years and during vacations worked as water
boy for the contracting firm of Fredin & Wilson. In 1897, on leaving
high school, he entere'd the great Duluth mercantile house of Marshall
& Wells, and acquired a thorough commercial training with that establishment.
Eighteen years later, in 1915, he employed his modest capital
to enter the retail hardware business at Barnum, and in 1918 returned
to Duluth and bought out the Johnson Hardware Company on West
Superior street. He has a highly satisfactory patronage and business and
keeps his store well stocked with heavy and shelf hardware, builders'
hardware, roofing and paper, paints and automobile supplies.
Mr. Persons is also well known in civic and social life, being a member
of the Duluth Builders Exchange, the Alpha-Omega Club, the Modern
Woodmen of America, and is a member of the First Swedish Baptist
Church. Politically he votes as an independent. On April 26, 1911,
he married Miss Ellen Renstrom, of Duluth. Their four children are
Virginia, born September 23, 1912, June, born June 30, 1916, and Charles
and Robert, twins, born April 15. 1918.
Captain Samuel Rickard, captain of the Mohawk Mine near
Aurora, is one of the most widely experienced and traveled mining men
on the Minnesota Range. He has mined various metals from tin to gold
in nearly all the celebrated mining districts of the Globe, from South
Africa to the Pacific Coast. He has been well and favorably known and
has found important responsibilities as a miner and mining official on
the Range for the past fifteen years.
Captain Rickard was born in Camborne, Cornwall, England. October
18, 1881, son of James and Mary Jane (Champion) Rickard, of Corn-
wall. By virtue of his environment, a Cornishman is almost born to a
career as a miner. James Rickard was a veteran miner in Cornwall,
and on his first trip to the United States he mined copper at Copper Falls
and in the old Central Mines. Later he came again to America, and
he worked in the copper and gold mines in many sections of the United
States. He finally returned to England and lived there until his death
in 1908, at the age of sixty-five. His wife never came to the United
States, though six of her sons took up their residence in this country.
Samuel Rickard had the advantages of the schools of Cornwall, and
at the age of fourteen went into the tin mines of that country, working
with his father. Not long afterward he came to the United States and
was employed in the old Kearsarge Mines at Calumet, Michigan. Later
experiences as a miner took him to Utah, Montana, British Columbia,
and in 1901, just after the close of the Boer war, he went to South
Africa and helped work some of the gold mines of the Transvaal. Leaving
that country, he again came to the United States and in 1905 located