1. Moses Hazeltine Sherman was an American land developer who built the Phoenix Street Railway in Phoenix, Arizona, and streetcar systems that would become the core of the Los Angeles Railway and part of the Pacific Electric Railway in Los Angeles, California, and owned and developed property in areas such as the westside of Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley and Hollywood, Los Angeles.
Moses Sherman was known as M H Sherman and General M H Sherman.
Moses Sherman was born in West Rupert, Vermont, on December 3,1853.
Moses Sherman obtained a teaching certificate at the Oswego Normal School in Oswego, New York.
Moses Sherman began as a teacher in Salem, New York and Wisconsin.
Safford offered Sherman a teaching post at the public school in Prescott.
Moses Sherman was selected to represent Arizona at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, and returned to Arizona with his sister Lucy, who was a teacher, and who met and married Eli P Clark, then serving at the Arizona territorial auditor.
In 1882, after Congress had appropriated land to support public education, Moses Sherman selected the lands which helped to provide for the future University of Arizona.
Moses Sherman earned the title "General" after his 1883 appointment as Adjutant-General of the Territory of Arizona, in which position he served two terms.
Moses Sherman acquired shares in mines, grazing lands and cattle and, as Prescott and Arizona grew rapidly, he made a good deal of money from his enterprises.
Moses Sherman invested in and was involved with the building of the Arizona Canal, which, started in early 1883, would become the main irrigation canal for the valley.
Moses Sherman was a major stockholder and vice president of the Phoenix Water Company.
Moses Sherman bought large quantities of real estate around Phoenix and became the largest taxpayer in Phoenix and one of the largest in the territory.
Shortly after moving to Los Angeles in 1890, Moses Sherman became a founding stockholder and director of the Los Angeles-based National Bank of California.
Moses Sherman, seeing promise in the new Sprague trolley technology, gained control of several street railway franchises, and immediately began to create a system based on this technology.
In 1895, after the company missed bond payments, Moses Sherman lost control of the Los Angeles Consolidated Electric, though he continued as a director and held a large stock interest in the company.
In 1896, at the junction of his Pasadena and Pacific streetcar line and what would become San Vicente Boulevard, just west of Hollywood, Moses Sherman acquired 5.6 acres of land and built storage yards and car barns, naming the area Moses Sherman.
Moses Sherman was vindicated, as the failures were actually the result of poor bank investments during the boom of the late 1880s, and of possible losses associated with the bonds of Los Angeles' cable railway system.
Moses Sherman remained on the board of the Pacific Electric Railway.
Moses Sherman was adept as using the electric railway to promote real estate investments.
Moses Sherman became associated with several prominent businessmen over the years in ever-larger projects.
In 1901 Whitley and Moses Sherman created the Los Angeles-Pacific Boulevard Development Company, which organized a syndicate that bought and subdivided a 480-acre area in Hollywood, a development which Whitley called the Hollywood Ocean Vista Tract.
Moses Sherman built curbs and sidewalks, planted shrubbery, and donated land for a bank and for the future Hollywood Hotel.
Chandler and Moses Sherman were the primary investors, in a syndicate of 70, who in 1911 purchased the Tejon Ranch, a 270,000 acre ranch along the Kern County-Los Angeles County border, from Truxtun Beale.
And, while not one of the original purchasers, in 1906 Moses Sherman invested in the Colorado River Land Company, a Mexican Corporation with 842,000 acres in the Mexican counterpart of the Imperial Valley.
William Randolph Hearst's paper, the Examiner, alleged that Moses Sherman, after hearing the news of the aqueduct through his position on the water board, informed his business friends, who then completed their purchase of the ranch.
Moses Sherman was removed from the Water Board in January, 1910, by mayor George Alexander, ostensibly because a department related to the aqueduct leased space in a building he held stock in, violating a municipal ordinance.
In 1903, Sherman became one of the incorporators of Frederick H Rindge's Hueneme, Malibu and Port Los Angeles Railway, which Rindge built as a means of blocking the creation of a railroad or other throughway along the shore of his Malibu Ranch.
Moses Sherman married Harriet Emily Pratt, daughter of Robert H Pratt, a leading figure in the Central Pacific Railway of San Francisco.
Moses Sherman had a house on Bay Island, Newport Beach, where he died September 9,1932.
Moses Sherman left an estate of several million dollars, leaving sizable sums to the University of Southern California, Pomona College, the California Institute of Technology and Grinnell College, Iowa.