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Collection: Directories and Documents
Lost Grass Valley Gold Rush History of the Wilhelm & Binkleman Pioneer Families by Waldo C.F. Potter (2024) (374 pages)
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Page: of 374
Prologue
As a little boy, . remember going to the San Francisco Bay area every year to visit my grandparents,
Brigadier General (U.S. Army retired) Waldo C. & Ida Louise Wilhelm Potter (Charlie & Poochie), in
Oakland, CA. My dad went to see his parents every year except when we were out of the country. My
dad was a West Pointer and made a career as a U.S. Air Force officer after serving in World War Il. All
five Wilhelm sisters ended up in the Bay area in retirement after spending their formative years growing
up in the mining town of Grass Valley in the 1870 — 1890s with their parents, Theodore H. & Rosa
Binkleman Wilhelm, and grandparents, David & Sophie Binklemann. We would visit each sister during
our week or two stay with my grandparents. The five sisters were remarkably close all their lives. . heard
many stories about Grass Valley. Unfortunately, . was not perceptive or analytical enough at the time to
ask my grandmother and aunts questions and write things down, but their great love for their childhood
home and town made a big impression on me. . heard them talking about Grass Valley and thought it
sounded so wonderful, like some perfect spot set on Earth. All the stories about its history, the sound of
its name, the family stories, and all the gold fascinated a small boy.
The book contains numerous newspaper clippings. Note the wording in many of them. The mining town
was born during the end of the Victorian era of speech in America, and the way articles were written
mimicked how learned people spoke in those days in this portion of California.
“Daught’s” historical narrative relating her first-hand discussions with my great-grandparents and greatgreat grandparents in Grass Valley piqued my interest. It made me want to learn more about the
Binklemann and Wilhelm families, the early Grass Valley pioneers. As the oldest in the family, . finally
realized in 2012 that my brother, Chris Potter, and . had to try to save this family history, or it would be
lost forever. Initially, we only had the six-page typewritten document by our “Aunt Daught.” “Daught”
was the daughter (therefore Daught for short) of James C. and Winifred Wilhelm Tyrell. Winifred was
the first of the five Wilhelm daughters to marry, and she married the boy next door. He was next door
to her parents’ home and was a self-made man who was the editor & owner of the Grass Valley
newspaper. . say this since it is important to know where we first got started with Winifred’s only child’s
fantastic essay about her life growing up in the mining town of Grass Valley, what her grandparents and
great-great-grandparents were like, and how they lived as one big family. “Daught” loved Grass Valley
so much that when she moved away to San Francisco, she would get very excited later in life to be part
of a road trip with her grandsons back to the town she loved the most in this world, Grass Valley, and
“to find a bunch of gold.” She wrote this document in 1968, right after the death of the last of her
aunts, the five daughters of Theodore H. and Rosa Binklemann Wilhelm. Since no male heirs were born
to the Wilhelms or Binklemans, the prominent Wilhelm and Binkleman family names died forever in
Grass Valley. All the rest of the data other than “Daught’s” document came from our research.
My brother, Chris Potter of Nevada City, CA, deserves special recognition for preserving the thousands
of family photos and documents and all his research on Ancestry.com. . would not have been able to
write this book without his help, research, and preservation of family photos and documents.
This document was written so that the public, historians, our family, and future descendants would
learn the history of these two prominent, pioneer California Gold Rush families of Grass Valley and get a
sense of what Grass Valley was like from 1853 to 1919.