B. D. MAXSON An honest, thoroughly reliable, kind-hearted and public-spirited gentleman, who has the distinction of having been one of the rig-builders in the Coalinga field ever since the start of the oil-development there in 1896, is B. D. Maxson, who first came to Fresno in the great boom year of 1887.
He was born in Richburg, Allegany County, N. Y., on September 18, 1847, the son of David Maxson, who was born in Rhode Island of Scotch descent. He was a farmer in Allegany County, who worked hard, accomplished much, but he died soon after oil was discovered on his farm, about 1873 or 1874. He had married Jane Coon, also a native of that county, although she came of old New England ancestry; and she died in New York. Both were members of the Seventh Day Baptist Church. They had seven children, three of whom are still living; and the subject of our story was the fifth eldest in the order of birth. A brother of B. D. Maxson, Cassius, was in the One Hundred Sixtieth New York Regiment serving in the Civil War, and was killed in the fighting before Petersburg.
B. D. Maxson was brought up on a farm in New York, and there attended the common and the Alfred high schools, When twenty-one he began to work at the carpenter's trade, and for some years worked as a contractor and builder. This led him naturally into the enterprise of rig-building in the Bradford oil field in Pennsylvania, and later he built rigs in Allegany County, so that when their old farm was leased for oil, he built the first rigs erected there. In the late eighties he came to Fresno, drawn here by the residence at the corner of N and Mariposa Streets of his brother. Dr. Willis H. Maxson, who had arrived in 1885 and had opened a sanitarium. He worked here as a contracting carpenter and builder, helped put up the Adventist Church and many of the most substantial and ornate of the early buildings, and thus contributed to laying the foundations of the great city that was to be. About 1889 he bought his present place of twenty acres on California Avenue, three miles west of Fresno, and two years later moved onto it. He immediately improved it with a muscat vineyard ; and when he decided to live here, he pulled up some of the vines, built a residence and planted ornamental trees. One of the fine features of the place that his wisdom and taste brought into existence at that time was a long, beautiful fig-arbor, or fig drive, of white Adriatic figs. n 1896, at the beginning of the oil development at Coalinga, he went there and constructed rigs for the Home, the Phoenix, the Crescent, the Coalinga & Mohawk and other oil companies ; and having successfully finished the first work there, he proceeded to Bakersfield and to Kern River, where he made the rigs for the Independent and other oil companies. He continued this difficult, and more or less pioneer work, all along the Coast, and put up rigs for test wells in Monterey County, as well as in Contra Costa County, near Mt. Diablo. He put up rigs for two test wells near Herndon, and one near Lane's Bridge, as well as a rig at Silver Creek, north of Mendota.
As one result of this work for oil companies, Mr. Maxson has from time to time become interested in oil-well projects, but his investments have never brought him the returns hoped for, or that they ought to have yielded. It is as a vineyardist that Mr. Maxson has had his greatest success in California ; for he has improved several vineyards in Fowler and West Park, selling them at a fair and just profit. He was a member of the California Fig Growers Association from its start, and of all the raisin associations, and is now a member of the California Associated Raisin Company. While in Allegany County, N. Y., Mr. Maxson was married to Miss Vina Mix, a native of that section, by whom he has had three children : Bertrand resides in Fresno and is a carpenter ; Genevieve, educated at the Fresno High School and the Pacific Union College at St. Helena, is now at home : and Louise, also a graduate of the Fresno High and the Pacific Union College, is teaching school in Kings County. Mr. Maxson used to be a member of the Seventh Day Baptist Church at Richburg, but was transferred as a member to the Church at Riverside, Cal. Wherever Mr. and Mrs. Maxson and their attractive family are known, there they have friends, the truest evidence of their value as citizens in the community, the county, and the great nation whose welfare they have so much at heart.
