George Wingfield

George Wingfield (August 16, 1876 – December 25, 1959) was a Nevada cattleman and gambler who became a financier, investor and one of the state's most powerful economic and political figures during the period from 1909 to 1932. With future senator George S. Nixon as his mentor after he settled in Winnemucca in 1899, and fellow gambler John Hennessy as his partner in the mining boomtown of Tonopah after 1901, Wingfield rose from faro-dealer to become richest man in Nevada in less than five years. Early and family life George Wingfield was born at Fort Smith, Arkansas in 1876 to Thomas Yates Wingfield (1846-1906)and his wife, the former Martha Matilda Spradling (1848-1940). His grandfather Edward Wingfield had moved his family (including his 3 sons, William, Thomas and Henry and their families) from Albemarle County, Virginia to Fort Smith in 1853, then moved to Missouri during the American Civil War, then back to Arkansas, and would move through Nevada, but settle in Oregon, only to resettle in Arizona, where two of his sons had settled and he died in 1880. Meanwhile, Thomas Wingfield's family moved with his extended family to Oregon when young George was five years old, and he would become a buckaroo on a ranch in Burns. He married, but after he made his first fortune in 1906, as discussed below, his wife, May, filed for divorce; the couple received an annulment. He then married a divorced woman, Maud Azil Murdoch Hamlin (1890-1955) of San Francisco, and they had a son, George Wingfield Jr. (1914-1987). Wingfield later married Roxy Thoma (1892-1979), daughter of a prominent doctor in Reno, who would survive and like George Jr., be buried beside Wingfield. Career