SOPHIA OF WISDOM III - GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA

SOPHIA OF WISDOM III - GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA

Family

George Smith Patton was born in San Gabriel, California to George Smith Patton Sr. (November, 1856 – June, 1927) and Ruth Wilson. Although he was technically the third George Smith Patton he was given the name Junior. The Pattons were an affluent family of Scottish descent. As a boy, Patton read widely in classics and military history. Patton's father was an acquaintance of John Singleton Mosby, a cavalry hero of the Confederate Army in the U.S. Civil War, serving first under J.E.B. Stuart and then as a guerrilla fighter. The younger Patton grew up hearing Mosby's stories of military glory. From an early age, the young Patton sought to become a general and hero in his own right.

Patton came from a long line of soldiers including General Hugh Mercer of the American Revolution.^[1] His great grandfather John M. Patton was a governor of Virginia. A great-uncle, Waller T. Patton, perished of wounds received in Pickett's Charge during the Battle of Gettysburg. Another relative, Hugh Weedon Mercer, was a Confederate General.

His 7th great-grandfather was Louis DuBois, a French Huguenot immigrant, who with 11 others founded the town of New Paltz, New York.

Patton's paternal grandparents were Colonel George Smith Patton (died in 1862^[2]) and Susan Thornton Glassell. Patton's grandfather, born in Fredericksburg, graduated from Virginia Military Institute (VMI), Class of 1852, second in a class of 24. After graduation, George Smith Patton studied law and practiced in Charleston. When the American Civil War broke out, he served in the 22nd Virginia Infantry of the Confederate States of America.

Dying at the Battle of Cedar Creek^[2] (the Third Battle of Winchester), Patton's grandfather left behind a namesake son, born in Charleston, Virginia (now West Virginia). The second George Smith Patton (born George William Patton in 1856, changing his name to honor his late father in 1868) was one of four children. Graduating from the Virginia Military Institute in 1877, Patton's father served as an L.A. County District Attorney and the first City Attorney for the city of Pasadena, California and the first mayor of San Marino, California. He was a Wilsonian Democrat with a romantic nostalgia for the lost cause of the Confederate States of America, was disgusted by Reconstruction, and publicly advocated the "continued supremacy" of "Aryan civilization." This certainly helped to shape George, Jr.'s attitudes as evidenced when he took his daughter, Ruth Ellen, to see Robert E. Lee's grave, and handing her a small Confederate flag, told her, "You're so unreconstructed."

His maternal grandparents were Benjamin Davis Wilson, (December 1, 1811 to March 11, 1878), the namesake of Southern California's Mount Wilson, and his second wife, Margaret Hereford. Wilson was a self-made man who was orphaned in Nashville, Tennessee, and made his fortune as a fur trapper and adventurer during the Indian wars and the war against Mexico, before marrying the daughter of a Mexican land baron and settling in what would become California's San Gabriel Valley.

Patton's mother kept paintings, and statues, of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson on the wall in their home. Patton admired them as he knelt to say his prayers, initially thinking that they were portraits of God and Jesus.

Patton—a staunch believer in reincarnation, along with many other members of his family—often claimed to have seen vivid, lifelike visions of his ancestors.

He was married to Beatrice Banning Ayer (January 12, 1886 - September 30, 1953), the daughter of a wealthy textile baron, on May 26, 1910. Together they had three children, Beatrice Smith (March 19, 1911–October 24, 1952), Ruth Ellen (February 28, 1915–November 25, 1993) and George Smith Patton (December 24, 1923–June 30, 2004).