1840–1918

Lucia Eugenia Lamb was born in Illinois on 3 June 1840, one of seven children born to Caleb and Harriet (Coffin) Lamb. While her father was born in Vermont, and her mother in Massachusetts, all of the Lamb children were raised in Illinois.

Lucia married Joseph Allen Everett in 1862 and immediately set out for Virginia City, Nevada, as a new bride. Lucia and Joseph’s first child, Grace, was born in that state in 1863. The family moved two years later to Grass Valley, California, where a second daughter, Harriet, was born in 1868. Grass Valley, which was to be Lucia’s home for the next fifty-three years, was a prosperous California mining community. A local history written in 1880 described Grass Valley as “the pride of the Pacific Coast. . . . on every hand are the signs of wealth and prosperity; hundreds of miners and artisans are employed in the mines, and in supporting these many stores, hotels, and boarding houses are sustained” (Thompson and West, 69, 67).

Joseph is listed as a carpenter in the 1880 Census, while Lucia kept house. Lucia also served as county president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and was active in her local church.

Joseph died in 1893 after thirty years of marriage. A widow for the next twenty-five years, Lucia died at Grass Valley on 2 June 1918, one day shy of her seventy-eighth birthday. Her pastor William Clark wrote that “of gentle disposition, pure character, well furnished mind and attractive personality, [Lucia’s] memory will be cherished.”

Bibliography

1880 California Census (J.A. Everett, Grass Valley, Nevada County, 119D).

Thompson, Thomas, and Albert West. History of Nevada County, California–1880. Berkeley: Howell-North Books, 1970.