Robert Vaughn

Robert Vaughn (born Robert Vaughan; June 5, 1836 – March 23, 1918) was a Welsh immigrant to the United States and an important rancher, farmer, and businessman in the U.S. state of Montana during the years before and after its statehood. He homesteaded the Vaughn ranch in the Sun River valley in Montana, building a sandstone mansion as his home there. The town of Vaughn, Montana, is named in his honor. He also helped co-found the city of Great Falls, where he built the Arvon Block, a hotel and stable and one of the city's earliest buildings; the ranch and the hotel are both listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Early life and career

Robert Vaughan was born on June 5, 1836, to Edward and Elizabeth Vaughan. The family lived near the village of Dinas Mawddwy in what was at the time the county of Meirionnydd (now the southeast part of the county of Gwynedd) in Wales, United Kingdom. He was the third of six children. His siblings included Jane, Hugh, Robert, Edward, John, and Mary. His father was a warden of the royal forest. He was educated minimally at home, worked on the family farm, and attended the Anglican Church in Wales. He spoke Welsh at home, but no English.

Vaughan left home at the age of 19 to take a position as a gardener for the wealthy banker Benjamin Heywood Jones in Liverpool (where his sister Jane lived). There he learned English, and in the fall of 1858 he traveled to Rome, New York, in the United States, to visit his brother Hugh, who had emigrated to the U.S. a year earlier. Vaughan traveled to America without telling his parents (doing so only after he arrived), and fully intended to return to Wales. After three months, he traveled to Palmyra, New York, to visit his father's sister. He stayed there a year, then moved to Youngstown, Ohio, where he worked as a coal miner and farmer. Vaughan then moved from Youngstown to live with Hugh in McLean County, Illinois, where he assisted on his brother's farm for three months in the summer of 1863 before moving to Fairbury, Illinois, where he mined coal.