Pitchera

Transcribed from "History of North Washington, an illustrated history of Stevens, Ferry, Okanogan and Chelan counties", published by Western Historical Publishing Co., 1904.

     ALEXANDER PITCHER, who for the last forty-three years, has been a frontiersman, having been on the plains as early as 1859, is now pleasantly located near Wenatchee, Chelan county, engaged in general farming and stockraising.
     Mr. Pitcher was born in Dutchess county, New York, November 24, 1836, the son of Jacob and Huldah (Uhle) Pitcher, natives of New York state. The ancestors of the father were Holland Dutch, and early settlers of the state. He died in Illinois in 1867. The ancestry of the mother was English. She passed away in Iowa in 1894.
     At the age of four years our subject was taken to Illinois by his parents, and in 1859 he went to Pike's Peak, but shortly afterwards returned to Council Bluffs, Iowa, and engaged in freighting across the plains. In 1863 he was in Boise City, Idaho, arriving there two weeks after the town was laid out. He erected the first hous there that was provided with a door. The following ten years were passed in various employments, mining, restaurant keeping, prospecting, and freighting. In 1879 he pushed on to Seattle, remaining but a few weeks, and going thence to Roseburg, Oregon. Having lost an arm there in a saw mill, he returned to Humboldt county, California, where he stopped ten years. It was in 1889 that he came to his present handsome location in Chelan county, six miles from Wenatchee, called Pitcher's Canyon.
     Our subject has five brothers, John, Adam, Jacob, Solomon and Henry, and three sisters, Maria Birchley, Elizabeth Smith and Jane. On March 27, 1862, at Council Bluffs, Iowa, he was married to Sarah E. Bell, a native of Marietta, Ohio. Her father, James Bell, deceased, was a native of Pennsylvania; her mother, Mary (Johnson) Bell, was born in Ohio, and now lives at Nashville, Tennessee, aged eighty years. Our subject has three children, George, Benton, and Effie, wife of David Murray, a miner and stockman of Republic, Washington.
     Fraternally he is a charter member of Wenatchee Lodge No. 157, I. 0. 0. F., and past noble grand. He took the degrees in California in 1876. Politically he is a Republican, and has served two terms as county commissioner of Kittitas county. He has frequently been a delegate to county conventions, has been a Republican since the election of Lincoln, and intends to remain in that party. Mr. Pitcher was the first assessor of Chelan county.