Bio: Hammond, Benjamin F. (1853 - 19??)

Contact: dolores@wiclarkcountyhistory.org

Surnames: Hammond, Sullivan, White, Bennett, Ray

----Source: History of Marathon County Wisconsin and Representative Citizens, by Louis Marchetti, 1913.

Hammond, Benjamin F. (17 November 1853 -19??)

Benjamin F. Hammond, one of the well known lumber operators of Marathon County, who came to Wausau in 1875 and has resided in this neighborhood ever since, has been associated with the Yawkey-Bissell Lumber Company at Arbor Vita, since June 8, 1893. He was born at Adams, in Jefferson County, N. Y., November 17, 1853, and is a son of William and Julia (Sullivan) Hammond, who moved to Manitowoc, Wis., in 1861.

Benjamin F. Hammond is largely a self-made man. He attended the public schools until sixteen years of age and then went to work in a saw mill far up the Manitowoc River. He came first to Wausau in 1875 but continued to work at different points, doing his last sawing at N. J. White's saw mill north of Colby, in Marathon County, in 1879, but from then until the present, his main interests have always been in connection with the timber and lumber business. He came to this section when the state was all covered with timber except right along the banks of the Wisconsin River, where it had been cut, and he worked at driving logs down the Wisconsin and its tributaries for a number of years. The Arbor Vita plant with which he has been connected for the past twenty years is one of the largest in the Wisconsin Valley and has an annual output of from forty to sixty million feet. In addition to his interests here, Mr. Hammond has a considerable amount of property to oversee including real estate at Wausau and a farm of 280 acres on East Hill, one mile from Wausau.

In 1875 Mr. Hammond was married to Miss Lucy Bennett, who was born at Claybank, on the west shore of Lake Michigan, and died at Merrill in 1883, survived by three children: Susan May, wife of Charles Ray, of Marinette, Wis.; Maude, who lives with her father; and Ray Leroy, who is employed in a paper mill at Tama, Ia. In politics Mr. Hammond is a Republican. He is a thirty-second degree Mason and belongs also to the K. T. M. He has never desired political advancement but has always taken an interest in the larger questions of civic life.