Biography of Charles Bevier

After years of toil and effort, and having seen many ups and downs in business in various parts of the country, the subject of this brief review is at last comfortably settled on a tract of excellent land which he redeemed from the waste and has made fruitful with all the products of advanced husbandry and cultivated life. His farm is located three miles northwest of Fruita, Mesa county, and is one of the best of its size in that prolific region. And moreover, what it is in the way of productiveness and profitable returns for labor, it is the work of his own systematic and well applied industry, and stands to his credit as a new creation in a section of the state which only needed the faith and perseverance of the husbandman to make it rich and prosperous. Mr. Bevier is a native of Livingston county, New York, born on September 29, 1841, and the son of Nathaniel and Anna F. (Ferguson) Bevier, who were also natives of the Empire state, and moved from there to Michigan when the son was but twelve years old. They located on a farm in Calhoun county and there passed the remainder of their days. Their family consisted of nine children, of whom Charles was the sixth, and eight of whom are living. He was reared on the farm and received a common-school education. On August 20, 1862, he enlisted in defense of the Union for the Civil war, and as a member of Company C, Twentieth Michigan Infantry, under General Wilcox. He participated in a number of important engagements, among them those at Fredericksburg, the Wilderness and Spottsylvania. At the last his left thigh was seriously wounded by part of a burst shell, and he was sent to the hospital at Washington, D.C., where he remained nearly a year, and was then discharged at the close of the war, having been in the service about three years, nearly a third of the time in the hospital. He returned to his Michigan home, and in the fall of 1865 moved to Nebraska, and taking up his residence in Otoe county, was successfully engaged in farming for a year, the grasshoppers destroying all his crops. The next six months were spent in Page county, Iowa, and at the end of that period he moved to Missouri and located at Cooper, where he remained three years. In October, 1871, he changed his base of operations to Kansas, settling in the spring of 1872 in Sumner county, and there taking up one hundred and sixty acres of land and buying one hundred and sixty more. For eleven years he farmed there industriously and prosperously, then came to Pueblo, Colorado, in the spring of 1883, and conducted a boarding house successfully at that point about a year, and afterward one at La Junta about the same length of time. From there he went to Ashcroft and followed mining, later engaging in the same precarious occupation at Aspen. In his mining operations he lost all he had, including his farm in Kansas, the decreasing price of silver being the cause of his disasters.

In April, 1893, he moved to Grand valley and bought the forty acres of land on which he now lives, three miles northwest of Fruita. It was wild land without improvements of any kind, and in fact there were but few improvements within a number of miles of it. But he had faith in its fertility and also in the neighborhood, and persevered in his laudable endeavors to make a home of his purchase. In this he has succeeded admirably, bringing his land to an advanced state of cultivation and erecting a commodious modern dwelling and other needed buildings on it. Twenty acres of the tract are in fruit, and the yield from these is abundant and profitable. On March 1, 1866, he was married to Miss Virginia Sandridge, a native of St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of Benjamin and Isabella (Monday) Sandridge, natives of Virginia, now both deceased. The father was a prosperous merchant. In politics Mr. Bevier is independent, with patriotic devotion to the welfare of his country, and with elevated ideals of public life and public service. Fraternally he is connected with the Odd Fellows and the Grand Army of the Republic. Mr. and Mrs. Bevier have an adopted son, Grant, now nineteen years old.


Source: Bowen, A. W. Progressive Men of Western Colorado. Chicago: A. W. Bowen & Co., Publishers. 1905.


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