Jacob Victor

Jacob Nash Victor was born on April 2, 1835 in Sandusky County, Ohio, the son of Henry Clay Victor & Gertrude Nash.
Jacob received his education in the public schools of Sandusky, and was apprenticed to a printer as a very young man. At the age of twenty he took up railroading, going to work with the “Mad River” railway, the first railroad line in Ohio. He remained with this company from 1855 until the outbreak of the Civil War. He was not conscripted as a soldier, having been deemed ineligible for military battle because of asthma. Instead, for three years he was in charge of military railway construction under General James B. McPherson. He later served under General Tecumseh Sherman in Georgia in a similar capacity in the closing year of the war, and was present during Sherman’s march to the sea through Georgia. After the surrender at Appomattox, Jacob Victor moved to Kansas City, where he was in charge of the Pacific Dispatch, a fast freight line then with International & Great Northern Railway of Texas in Houston and Galveston. In the 1870s, while yet employed with International & Great Northern, he came to New York, where he met and married Elizabeth Blackwell Burlew, a native of Syracuse and a descendant of an early American family. They would eventually have three children, Hugo, Royal and Lenore.
While with the Great Northern Railway of Texas, he sojourned frequently to New York, where, as a civil engineer, he studied the progress in railroad construction technique and was involved in the corruption and competition connected with railroad expansion to the Pacific Coast.
While in New York, his health broke down. To recover, Victor in 1881 accepted a position in Colton with the California Southern Railroad, a subsidiary of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, initially as a freight agent and then as general manager of operations.
Then 46-years-old, Victor was at the seeming end of his railroad career.
Over the previous two years, San Bernardino County surveyor Frederick T. Perris had been assiduously lobbying Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway officers to construct a line from San Diego northward to San Bernardino to be augmented with the extension of the line up the Cajon Pass and then north to junction with the Atlantic & Pacific-Santa Fe line at Waterman, i.e., present day-Barstow. While Perris was making his entreaties, a dispute had arisen over the Southern Pacific Railway’s refusal to permit other railways to cross its tracks. Perris’ efforts paid off, convincing AT&SF officials, who were itching for a route to effectively break the Southern Pacific Railroad’s monopoly on transportation into Southern California, to brave the engineering and grading challenges.
Victor, an expert on trestles and bridges, was chosen to oversee Perris and other engineers brought in to supervise the Chinese coolies who laid the track. As the general manager and chief engineer of the California Southern Railroad, Victor incorporated a “Y” track into the two sets of tracks to allow free standing locomotives to turn around and reattach themselves to assist long and heavy trains up the grade to the Cajon Summit. In 1884 the California Southern Railroad reached San Bernardino, but the same year Nash encountered a devastating, though temporary setback, when roughly 30 miles of track were swept away by floods. By 1885 the track was rebuilt and extended through the Cajon Pass.
Victor designed the bridge across the Mojave River. Though the bridge was destroyed in the flood of 1938, the granite abutment to the bridge is still in use and stands as the oldest structure in the Victor Valley.
Once the track had reached the Summit, Victor was kept on as the superintendent of desert construction, a $1,750,000 undertaking to connect the rail at the top of Cajon Summit with the A & P Railroad at Barstow.
The railroad activity near the crossing of the Mojave offered enough activity and business for a small town to form there. It was initially called Huntington. Victor’s home in Victorville was located at 8th and D streets and was known when it was owned by Mrs. Jennie Mae Richardson in the 1940s as the Hillcrest Lodge. By the late 1880s the area around his home came to be known as Victor. In 1911, the U.S. Post Office, to distinguish Victor, California from Victor, Colorado, against the will of the local population, renamed the town Victorville. Following the completion of the railway to its eastern connection an arrangement was effected with the Santa Fe Railway under the management of C. W. Smith.
After the Santa Fe absorbed the California Southern in name as well as in fact, Victor retired in 1888 and moved to Chino, where he was elected to the board of supervisors as the representative of the county’s Fourth District. He served for three years as board chairman during his tenure on the board, which lasted from January 5, 1891 to January 7, 1895.
Victor came onto the board during one of the most contentious times in San Bernardino County history. This bitter division resulted in the creation of Riverside County on February 23, 1893. The contention included a need for a new courthouse and the ambitions of several communities to become a county seat. Two supervisors, G.W. Garcelon and W.H. Glass, resigned fom the board on December 9, 1891 and in their places J.C. Turner of Victor Valley and William H. Randall of Highland were appointed.
As a railroad engineer, Victor recognized the natural threat of flooding and was an expert in repairing flood damage. Consequently, when the heavy storms or flash floods ruined any bridge structures, Victor insisted they be replaced with steel. As a result, the railroad bridges spanning the Mojave River in Daggett and Victorville, the bridges over Lytle Creek at Mt. Vernon and at Fourth Street, a bridge west of Cucamonga and others were constructed or reconstructed soundly and most are still in use today
In 1898, the Victor family settled in San Bernardino. It was there that Jacob Nash Victor died on October 3, 1907. He was survived by his wife, Elizabeth and their three children: Hugo Victor, then the Santa Fe Agent at Williams, Arizona; “Rolbo” Victor, a member of the law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell in New York City then residing in Yonkers, New York; and Mrs. H. Star Giddings, the former Lenore Victor, also of Yonkers, New York.