His surname was pronounced red-ding.

For an account of his more famous exploits and adventures during the 1840's and 1850's, I defer to a multitude of biographies which can be found on-line. Google his name. His story and its historical significance deserves a read.

This bio primarily focuses on Pierson's family.
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Ancestry and Siblings

His great grandfather was John Reading (1686–1767), a governor of New Jersey and a trustee of the College of New Jersey at Trenton. His great grandmother was Mary Ryerson. John and Mary's son, Thomas, co-founded Princeton University.

He was the grandson of Judge Joseph Reading (1728-1806), Captain of the Militia: Revolutionary War; and his wife, Amy Polly Pearson (ca. 1730).

His father married in 1804 his first wife, Mary Opdyke, daughter of Samuel and Susanna (Robeson). His half siblings by the couple were Mrs. Amy (Reading) Cooley (1807-1897); Joseph Reading (1808-1825); Mrs. Mary (Reading) Mason (ca. 1810); and Susan (ca. 1805), who married Robeson Rockhill.

His half siblings by his mother and her first husband, William E. Green (who died in 1813 after he was accidentally dragged by a horse at his Cherry Grove farm), were Enoch W. Green (1800-1868) unmarried; Mary Ann (1802-1876); Charles B. Green (1804-1834) unmarried; Elizabeth Guild (1807-1895); Philip Physick Green (1811-1860) unmarried; and William E. Green, Jr. (1813-1886).

His parents were Peirson Reading (1783-1847) of Amwell Township, and Charity 'Chatty' Guild (1781-1864) of Ewing Township. The New Jersey communities, which are 13 miles apart, are now in different counties. When the couple wed on September 16, 1815, they were both within the jurisdiction of Hunterdon (Mercer was formed in 1838).

Peirson Sr. was an inventor of farm implements and owned several patents. Charity was a well-to-do widow; the daughter of John Guild (1749) and Abigail Howell (1752). The newlywed couple's combined offspring numbered ten, and they made their residence at the Green family's Cherry Grove Farm on Wilburtha Road in Ewing, now West Trenton. The home is listed on the state and national registers.

Pierson Barton Reading came into this world on November 26, 1816, in Hunterdon county, New Jersey according to his biographer, Eleanor Templeman.

In Oct. 1850, Pierson had been counted on the census in Sacramento, where he told the enumerator his place of birth was 'unknown'. In Shasta county Nov. 1850 and 10 years later in 1860, he reported Pennsylvania as his place of birth. On the census in subsequent years, his children offered their father's birth place as New Jersey, California, and Virginia.

Pierson had two full blood siblings:

John Guild Reading (1819-1850) was born near Trenton, New Jersey, and in 1847 married Caroline M. Burton (1826-1873), daughter of Robert Burton and Eliza Elliott Hutton of Pennsylvania. The couple had one child, Robert Burton Reading, born 1848, who died at age 17 of typhoid. John died in Philadelphia in 1850 of TB, after which his widow remarried in 1856 to John Clayton Rockhill, Reading's nephew by his half sister, Susan. Caroline died Feb. 23, 1873.

Alfred Reading (1820-1894) was born in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, and on October 3rd, 1855 in Trenton, married Bridget O'Connell (1836-1904) of Ireland, daughter of Lawrence O'Connell and Catherine Chute. The couple had nine children (dates approx): Mary Ann (b.1856); Pearson (b.1859); John J. (b.1860, who married Ella Buckley); Catherine Cecilia (b.1862, who married James P. Buckley); Alfred A. (b.1864); Joseph H. (b.1866); Charles A. (b.1867); Emma (b.1869); and Elizabeth (b.1872).

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Early Life

In 1830, 14 year old Pierson moved to the Madison County Mississippi home of his step uncle, attorney Charles B. Green, brother of his mother's first husband, where in 1834 he found work as a cotton broker. Two years after the bale price crashed in 1837, the 21 year old left Mississippi owing money.

[After finding gold near his property in California in 1849, Pierson B. Reading returned to Mississippi and repaid his outstanding debts, much to the surprise of his creditors.]

On June 18, 1852, P.B. Reading was appointed Superintendent of Indian Affairs for California, by Congress.

In 1856, while back east to conduct business, Pierson courted Fannie Washington in D.C. after meeting her by way of a letter of introduction from her uncle, his comrade in arms at Fort Reading.

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Marriage and Family Timeline

Pierson married Euphan 'Fannie' Wallace Washington (1831-1918) on March 12, 1856 in the District of Columbia. He brought his bride, by way of the isthmus of Panama, to his 26,632 acre rancho on the California frontier, which he had named the "Buena Ventura".

The couple had six children born at the adobe house he built by the western bank of the Sacramento River:

Anna Washington Reading: (1857-1906 DC)

Alice Matilda Reading: (1859-1939 CA)

Pierson Barton Reading, Jr.: (1861-1862 CA)

Richard Washington Reading, twin: (1863-1925 CA, bd VA)

Robert Lee Reading, twin: (1863-1918 CA, bd VA)

Fannie 'Nina' Collins Reading: (1865-1888 DC)

In December of 1859 the couple traveled to D.C. over the Christmas holidays to show family their first two daughters. They returned in June of 1860, and according to a published account, brought a girl named Jeanette back with them.

The book, Man of Destiny Pierson Barton Reading by Helen S. Giffen, co-authored by Eleanor Lee (Reading) Templeman, states that Pierson Barton Reading was Jeanette's father. The two brief passages that intimate this, both attached to the year 1842, were: "He suffered the death of his young wife," pp.3 and "...it is understandable that he should wish to see his family, and also arrange for the future of his daughter during his absence." pp.4.

On November 7th 1866, Jeanette married then Cpt. Robert Simson, a former pioneer explorer, lawyer and wealthy land owner from the Bay area of Oakland.

The couple had one child, Leslie Simson, born in 1867.

Jeanette Reading (?-?)
Col. Robert Simson (1819-1901)
Leslie Simson (1867-1939)

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Death

1868 May 29, San Francisco Bulletin
(San Francisco, California) Death of P.B. Reading

public domain, ie: original works created before 1894, or published before 1923

-- We learn that Major P.B. Reading, one of the oldest and best known American citizens of California, died at his residence in Shasta county this morning at 3 o'clock.

-- Major Reading had been a resident of California nearly a quarter of a century, and has been identified with the settlement and cultivation of the upper Sacramento country, where he has owned and improved one of the finest ranches in the State. He came here first as a hunter and trapper, and in that capacity left Sutter's Fort, the present site of Sacramento in the spring of 1845, with thirty men, to trap for otter and beaver along the streams of the district now known as Trinity county. This party was probably the first band of white men who ever explored that rugged region. The principal stream they encountered was given the name of Trinity, which it has ever since borne, in the belief that it emptied into Trinidad Bay as laid down in the Old Spanish charts. Beaver and Otter were quite plentiful on the Trinity streams and along the headwaters of the Sacramento as late as 1850, and some of the old Canadian trappers sought them even so recently as 1851.

-- Reading returned to the Trinity when gold was discovered in 1848. with a party of 60 Indians whom like nearly all the old rancheros then in the State he employed to help him in mining. This party not only extracted gold in the river banks, but they found it in the gulches and creeks in the vicinity of the present town of Shasta, which locality was known as Reading's Springs and was the scene of one of the principal mining rushes in the summer of 1849.

-- Since 1850 Major Reading has resided on his ranch on the upper Sacramento and has been known to thousands by his urbane and hospitable manners. He had some prominence as a member of the Whig party at one time and we think was several times nominated for office though not an office seeker. In 1851 he was the Whig candidate for Governor against John Bigler, and thousands of old Whigs still assert that he was elected, and only prevented from taking the office by the sharp practice of throwing out the vote of a precinct near the Oregon line on the pretense that it was in Oregon, although the same vote was afterwards admitted to decide the seat of a Democratic Assemblyman. After the war began his Southern proclivities led him into the Democratic party.

-- He was a man of gentlemanly and honorable traits and useful life. He leaves a wife and children.~

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Pierson's sudden and untimely death surprised everyone. His youngest child was only two. He was buried in the family cemetery, a quarter mile west of his adobe house, next to the grave of his first son, Pierson Jr.

Unfortunately for his widow, much of his once vast ranch land had already been sold and the remaining acreage, collateral for an unpaid loan, was auctioned off in 1871 to satisfy the debt.

After the sale, Reading's family was left with only the homestead, on which sat the adobe house, and one square mile of the original land grant, the Washington Section, which was owned by Pierson's mother-in-law.

Disheartened by the loss of her husband, Fannie took her children to the District Of Columbia, to live at the home of her mother, Mrs. Ann Matilda Washington. She never remarried, and remained in the D. C. area for 47 years until her death in 1918.

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Descendants (in order by death year)

Pierson Barton Reading, Jr. died on December 23rd, 1862, a year and four months after his birth in August of 1871. The child was the first to be buried at the Reading Family Cemetery on the rancho.

Fannie C. Reading: Nina, youngest daughter of Fannie W. and the late Maj. P.B. Reading, died December 17, 1888 at 9 o'clock p.m. Congressional Cemetery, Washington D. C. death notice. Pierson mentioned her in a letter to a friend. Evidently, even as a child, she was burdened with an unspecified infirmity.

Daughter, Anna W. Reading, died at the Terra Cotta D.C. metro station (present day Fort Totten) at the age of 21, a victim of the Baltimore & Ohio train wreck of Dec. 30, 1906, which killed 53 people. The engineer of a heavy locomotive missed a stop signal in the fog and under full steam plowed through the rear two wooden cars of a just-departing passenger train, which was running 15 minutes late. Her death notice stated: Funeral from St. Thomas Church, Wednesday, January 2, 1907 at 11 o'clock. Interment private.

Daughter, Jeanette (Reading) Simson, died in or before 1910, possibly while visiting her son, Leslie, at his Johannesburg home in South Africa. source: "Man of Destiny, pp.123"

Son, Robert L. Reading, twin of Richard, married March 7, 1905 in Virginia to Nell C. Clarkson (1866-1948 VA). The couple's only child, Eleanor Lee Reading, was born in Virginia in 1906. Robert returned to California with his wife and 4 year old daughter in 1910 and died October 27, 1918 in Redding. His body was sent to a San Francisco funeral home; then shipped back to Virginia for burial. Both Nellie and her daughter returned there in 1928. Eleanor later married Robert Morris Templeman and had a son, Robert Lee Templeman, born in 1944. All are buried in Virginia.

Son, Capt. Richard W. Reading, twin of Robert, at the age of 24, moved to Alameda county and partnered with his sister Janet's husband, Robert Simson in 1887 to form the Oakland and San Joaquin Railroad Company, which in 1895 built the Alameda and San Joaquin Railroad, a 35 mile line which served a coal company until it was sold to the WPRR in 1903. In Virginia, August 13, 1917, he married Clara Octavia Graham (1878-1972 VA), then returned to California in 1920. He died in 1925 in Anderson. The couple had no children. Both he and his wife were buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

Daughter, Alice Matilda Reading, an accomplished artist, returned to California in 1924 where she continued her painting career. A co-founder of the Shasta Historical Society, she was dedicated to preserving the history of the region. Miss Reading alternately spent time at her family's remaining Buena Ventura property and her residence in Redding until her death in 1939. She was buried alongside her father and brother at the Reading Family Cemetery near the adobe home where she was born.

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Notes

Pierson's father's name was spelled with the 'ie' reversed.

There are several excellent displays for P.B.R. inside the Courthouse Museum at Shasta State Historic Park in Old Shasta.

His biography, "Man of Destiny: Pierson Barton Reading, Pioneer of Shasta County, California" by Helen Smith Giffen and Eleanor Templeman, Jan 1, 1985, is available at Shasta Historical Society, Amazon, and may be in your local library.

Links in the bio to related memorials are provided as a convenience. The author is not responsible for their content.