Researching Samuel Taylor

Taylor's first business in California was a bacon and egg stand on the beach. "Upon arrival Taylor found a wooden cask of eggs floating near the shore. He cooked the eggs, overturned the cask, and set up a food stand on the beach." In 1853, Taylor left for Hawkins Bar, California in Tuolumne County to prospect for gold. He used his profits to buy land in Marin County and enter the paper business.

Samuel Taylor was ahead of his time in producing recycled paper products from rags and old papers that his employees collected from various California cities and in creating the first fish ladder on the West Coast to help fish swim upstream around the dam near his paper mill. Taylor married Sarah Washington Irving, raised a family of seven boys and one girl, and served on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Working with other concerned citizens, Mr. and Mrs. Taylor helped stop the importation of Chinese slave girls into San Francisco.

After Samuel Taylor's death in 1886, his wife lost the paper mill and land around it in the Panic of 1893. The new owners of the Taylors' land (who refused to allow Sarah Taylor to be buried next to her husband on the family plot) lost the property themselves when it was taken by the State of California in 1945 for non-payment of taxes. The state then created Samuel P. Taylor State Park.

Taylor is buried on a hill overlooking the former site of the mill. His gravesite was restored in 1997 by Freemasons of San Francisco Oriental Lodge No. 144. Sarah Washington Irving now lies next to her husband on the southwest slope of Barnabe Mountain (near ).

Taylor was educated at University College London and ordained in 1885. After a curacy at St John the Evangelist's Leeds he became the first vicar of St Aidan's (Bishop Woodford Memorial) Leeds; He was then a canon residentiary and the precentor at Southwark Cathedral, then Archdeacon of Southwark. His penultimate post, until his resignation in 1921, was as a suffragan bishop. Finally he was appointed to lead the worship for St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle.

He began working on his own method of stenography in 1773, based on earlier efforts. In 1786, he published An Essay Intended to Establish a Standard for an Universal System of Stenography, or Short Hand Writing..., the first shorthand system to be used all over the English-speaking world. His stenographic method consisted in cutting out the superfluous consonants as well as the vowels in polysyllabic words. It used an alphabet composed of 19 letters of simplified shapes.

He taught stenography at Oxford as well as the universities of Scotland and Ireland for many years.

His system was adopted for several other languages, including French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Swedish. His book was translated and published in France by Théodore-Pierre Bertin in 1792 under the title Système universel et complet de Stenographie ou Manière abrégée d'écrire applicable à tous les idiomes.

He also published a book on angling in 1800, titled Angling in All Its Branches.

Samuel Taylor was born July 24, 1856 in Champaign County, Ohio. He attended country schools and graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1882, where he was Phi Gamma Delta, and the Cincinnati Law School, where he graduated in 1884. He located in Urbana, Ohio, where he practiced. He was elected in 1887 to represent Champaign County in the 68th General Assembly, and re-elected 1889 and 1891 to the 69th and 70th, from which he resigned. He resigned when elected in 1892 to Ohio Secretary of State, and then was re-elected in 1894.

After leaving office in 1897, Taylor was appointed consul to Glasgow, Scotland, by President McKinley. He was transferred to Callao, Peru in 1906, and served there until 1910. He was appointed consul to Birmingham, England, in 1913, and served there until his death from influenza in that city, December 7, 1916. He was buried at Oak Dale Cemetery in Urbana.