Warren Miller: Gold Rush Architect & Inventor

This oldest known image of Miller's Marysville home was taken in 1875. Photo courtesy of Mary Aaron Museum

Warren P. Miller was one of a special breed of Gold Rush characters. He didn't travel to California to mine -- he came to mine the miners.

A 30-year-old journeyman carpenter, Miller arrived in California in the Fall of 1850 dreaming of becoming an architect. The west, he believed, would be a land of new cities and new buildings -- his kind of gold. By the time Warren Miller left California in 1869, he had mined his own ingenuity.

Miller designed many of most significant buildings in early Marysville and had won acclaim as a mechanical genius who patented several exciting inventions, including the first tractor crawler built in the U.S. and an improved gun turret for civil war warships.

In October of 1850, Miller turned up in Marysville, working as a carpenter and hammering together slap-dash structures of canvas and boards. As miners continued to rush in, gold flowed back from camps, such as Rich Bar, Rough and Ready, You Bet, Whiskey Flat and Helltown. As the main supply center to these northern gold camps, Marysville boomed. A personal account from this era tells that in one 10 day period over 17 houses and stores were constructed. Gold Rush carpenters could earn $6-8 a day and sometimes more, while back home in the East, the prevailing wage was only $1 or $2 per day. It was the profits from his carpentry work that Miller used as capital for his western adventure.

By late November, Miller began moonlighting as a real estate prospector, buying lots at auction that the county had reposessed in exchange for unpaid debts or taxes. By 1854, he had bankrolled about $10,000 ($400,000 when adjusted for inflation). Miller's mechanical and entreprenuerial skills blossomed in the spring of 1851, when he erected and started operating public hay scales. The young nail-pounder was becoming respectable.

It was around 1855, after he had married Mehitable "Hettie" Livermore of Spencer, Mass. and had his first child, that Warren Miller's rise to public prominance began. His Yuba County Courthouse was completed in 1855 and in February, he was selected as a founding Director of the Marysville Library Association. (When that group eventually disbanded and donated their 2,200 volume library to the City, it created the first public library in Yuba County.)

In March, Miller was elected as an alderman to the town council and in October, he and Hettie bought a lot on the corner of 7th and D streets and began the construction of their own elegant home.

Agricultural Pavilion designed by Warren Miller for the 1858 California State Fair, held in Marysville. Photo courtesy California State Library

Marysville's Top Architect

Almost all of the well-known Miller buildings were crafted in the Gothic Revival style of architecture that was the toast of New York around the time that Miller left for California. In the 1850's and 60's, this style was more prominant in Marysville than anywhere else in northern California, thanks largely to Miller, who almost singlehandedly gave early the town its unique architectural face.

The Wheels of Invention

Miller took the opportunity to present his first three inventions alongside the pavilion. It was a good decision: His self-regulating windmill won a first prize medal and Miller's steam tractor crawler -- the first built in the U.S. -- brought down the house.

Miller's tractor is classified as a crawler because it was driven by a track, like a modern military tank, rather than by wheels. Miller also patented an Excavator & Grader that was to be pulled by the tractor. The whole kit won a first prize medal and $50 award, followed by a Special Merit award of $400.

As Miller demonstrated the tractor in the streets of Marysville before, during0 and after the State Fair, the bizarre machine drew hefty crowds of curious onlookers. Reporters scrambled to publish numerous articles about the crawler in local and regional publications.

Warren Miller's mock-up of his award-winning tractor-crawler

But Miller's idea for a steam-driven tractor came some 20 years ahead of its time and his idea for a crawler tractor was nearly a half-century premature.

Steam-driven tractors didn't take off commercially until California laws that had created an open-range environment that favored stockmen over farmers were repealed in 1872. This made large-scale agriculture feasible. The invention of barbed wire in 1874 made it affordable. A marketable crawler tractor was finally introduced by a California farm implement company, Holt & Co. of Stockton, now known as Caterpillar Tractor.

War and Miller

For months following the watery conflict, Warren Miller set his mental gears turning on improving the iron-clad warship. His concentration yeilded U.S. Patent No. 38,118 -- Improvement In Operating Ordnance On War-Vessels.

One of the problems with the Monitor-class warship was that the turret made them top-heavy and unstable in open seas. Miller attacked this flaw and developed a gun carriage that would replace the turret. Miller's guns sat on steam-powered elevators that dropped them to a lower deck for reloading. While the ship navigated on open seas, the guns could be lowered to the bottom of the ship to eliminate the top-heaviness while adding extra centerline ballast.

While Miller toiled on his new invention in Marysville, several prominant and wealthy San Franciscans (including some former Marysville residents) were organizing the California Gunboat Company to raise $1.1 million to support construction of Miller's gunboats.

England and France were threatening the U.S. over the Union's interference in their trade with the South, and with the war in the East drawing military resources, California was left virtually undefended. The Commander of the Division of the Pacific examined San Francisco's port defenses and concluded that, without warships, he did not think it could be defended from a naval attack.

Miller thought he was in business. His new invention, however, spelled the end of an era for Marysville: Miller sold his elegant home in 1863 and moved to San Francisco. Two days later, he sailed for Washington D. C. to sell his invention to the War Department.

No one knows what became of Miller's trip to the War Department, but it apparently wasn't successful. Unlike Miller's steam tractor crawler idea, the gun turret came too late. In the Spring of 1863, by the time Miller would have arrived in Washington, the government had already ordered virtually all of the iron-clad warships that it would need for the Civil War.

Success

The blades were an enduring success. An official of R. Hoe & Co. indicated in 1901 that the company expected to sell 6 million of Miller's replaceable teeth that year. A 1924 propectus by R. Hoe & Co. seeking to raise investment capital for the firm stated that manufacture of the inserted tooth circular wood saws "... contributes substantially to the net earnings of the company."

With the sale of his saw blade patents to R. Hoe & Co., Miller returned to New York City in 1869 to live off his royalties and continue to patent new inventions until 1883. Over his lifetime, Warren Miller patented some twenty-eight inventions. He retired in comfort in 1878 to the fashionable neighborhood of Cobble Hill in Brooklyn Heights.

Warren P. Miller died of cancer in New York City on Oct. 9, 1888. He was 68 years old.