Series 8 - Thomas Higgins autobiographical letter transcript

21pp

The Higgins letter was provided to Kerby A. Miller for duplication by J.J. Higgins, grandnephew of the author, per letter of 23 January 1978.

Kerby A. Miller's transcript of Thomas Higgins' autobiographical letter. Thomas Higgins was born in 1844 in near Boyle in County Roscommon and emigrated to Wisconsin in 1858 with his parents and siblings. Higgins worked a number of different jobs throughout his life, including working as a lumberjack in Wisconsin, building docks in Chicago and levees in Louisiana, and in railway construction through the American Midwest. He also prospected for gold in the Pacific Northwest and copper in Arizona. He moved to Los Angeles in 1900 where he ran a successful property business and became a philanthropist. Higgins died in Los Angeles in 1920 having completed the Higgins Building downtown in 1910. He wrote the letter included in this series from Los Angeles, California to his cousin, Cecilia Keefe in Mosinee, Wisconsin in 1916. Kerby A. Miller writes that the letter itself 'is a memoir -and an excellent and fairly long one- that Higgins presented to his cousin in letter form, conveying extensive, chronologically-arranged, autobiographical information... ...Higgins describes in some detail his years of travail as an itinerant unskilled and semi-skilled laborer on American construction projects in the Northern and Southern states, and his eventually successful struggles as a hard-rock miner in the Pacific Northwest and, finally, in Arizona Territory -where he battled extreme heat and angry natives- between 1862 and the early 1900s, when he finally became rich, moved to Los Angeles, and built that city's first skyscraper, the Higgins Building, which still stands. His memoir is also interesting in how he shared his wealth with his long-lost siblings and their families-in Ireland, the US, and even Australia-some of whom he brought to Los Angeles and employed.'

The reference copy of Anderson's memoir, and Miller's extensive research related to Higgins, his family, and his business, are located in P155/14/1.