Ellemerie Putnam Morgan Wickham Papers

Ellemerie Rebecca Briggs was born on January 29, 1897, in Indianapolis, Indiana, to Genevieve Lamson and Harry Wason Briggs. At 16, Wickham was a member of the Ziegfeld Follies before marrying her first husband, Scott Putnam, with whom she had one son. In the 1920s, she moved with her mother to Georgetown, California, where she met her second husband, Joseph L. Morgan; they were married on January 22, 1927, and had one son, J. Patrick Morgan. On April 17, 1950, she married her third husband, Frank W. Wickham, in the Opalite Mining District, Humboldt County, Nevada.

In the 1930s, Wickham became interested in mining. From 1932-1946, she worked as a field engineer for the South African Goldfields Mining Company in Canada and the United States. At that time, the company was making a comprehensive mineral survey of the Mother Lode country on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California. Beginning in 1946, Wickham worked as a consultant for others in the industry and eventually worked as a field engineer for the E. A. Wiltsee Company of Oroville, California.

Throughout the 1940s and until her death, Wickham owned and operated a number of mining claims, successfully developing many of them, including the Three Queens Mine near Foresthill, Placer County, California, and the Ohio Mine in Humboldt County, Nevada.

Ellemerie Morgan Wickham died in San Francisco, California, following heart surgery on September 23, 1958.

[Note adapted from obituaries included with the collection and FamilySearch.org, accessed February 7, 2023.]