St. John, Enos Frost

Enos Frost St. John was born in Troy, Oakland County, Michigan, on April 10, 1835, to Daniel St. John and Olivia Marsh. He traveled to California across the plains with an ox team in 1857, arriving at the Yuba River above Downieville after witnessing border strife in Kansas. He worked for horticulturist G. G. Briggs in Marysville and Ventura County for several years before returning East, where he married Mrs. Sylvia A. Lowry St. John at Ann Arbor in the fall of 1869. After farming in New Jersey and Wayne County, Michigan, he returned to California with his family in 1888 to settle near Malaga in Fresno County.

In Fresno County, Enos improved sixty acres planted primarily to muscat vines and acted as an agent selling the townsite of Malaga for the Briggs estate. In 1902, he purchased a highly improved forty-acre ranch on Cherry Avenue in the Fresno Colony, where he resided with his family, which included children Irma, Fred E., Fannie O., and Daisy. Cast his first vote for Abraham Lincoln in Santa Barbara County in 1864, he remained an active Republican, a supporter of the Raisin Growers Association, and a member of the First Baptist Church of Fresno.