Harry Howard Webb was born in San Francisco, the older in a family of two sons of Christopher Columbus and Harriet Louise (Hord) Webb. His father, a native of Weymouth, Massachussets, and one of the original California Forty-Niners, was a wool-grower and stock-raiser and a substantial landowner in northern California. As his mother liked her given name and her middle name she called her first son Harry and her second son Louis.
Young Harry received his early schooling at the Lincoln Grammar School in San Francisco. After graduating, Ph. B. , from the University of California in 1875.
He followed a boyhood interest in engineering and went to work in the mines of Nevada's great Comstock Lode. His earnings there helped to finance studies abroad at the Royal School of Mines in London and later at the famous school of mines in Freiberg, Germany. Returning to the Far West, Webb served as mining engineer in the Bunker Hill and Sullivan mines in Idaho's Coeur d'Alene district and in the Anaconda Copper Company's Montana smelter. In 1895, while employed in another mining position in California, he was appointed consultant for the United Rhodesia Gold Fields Company in Northern Rhodesia, an affiliate of Cecil Rhodes's Consolidated Gold Fields of South Africa, at a salary of $15, 000 a year. Webb thus became one of that group of California mining engineers - among them his grammar-school classmate John Hays Hammond - who in the last two decades of the nineteenth century moved to South Africa to direct operations in the developing gold and diamond mines there. In 1896, the year when Hammond was forced to leave South Africa after the abortive Jameson Raid, Webb became superintendent on the engineering staff of Consolidated Gold Fields, and by 1906 he had succeeded Hammond as consulting engineer of that company and a number of its affiliates. In 1902 he was elected president of the South African Association of Engineers. An able executive, Webb remained for some years in association with the Rhodes interests, with offices successively in Johannesburg, London, and New York. Until 1916 he retained the position of consulting engineer of Consolidated Gold Fields of South Africa. He also inspected and reported on properties in the United States, Mexico, Russia, and Spain, his keen judgment resulting in the successful investment of large sums of money. In 1917 he became consulting engineer for Gold Fields American Development Company, an undertaking of the Consolidated firm, and in 1918 he and seven members of Consolidated organized a syndicate to develop an immense potash and borax deposit at Searles Dry Lake, Trona, near Death Valley, Calif. This was the forerunner of the company later known as American Potash & Chemical Corporation. In 1919 he retired from his successful career as mining engineer and settled at Montecito, a suburb of Santa Barbara, Calif. , and it was there that he died in his eighty-sixth year. He was buried in the Montecito cemetery.
He took the position of consulting engineer of Consolidated Gold Fields of South Africa. He also inspected and reported on properties in the United States, Mexico, Russia, and Spain, his keen judgment resulting in the successful investment of large sums of money. He was also consulting engineer for Gold Fields American Development Company.
Webb was a gentle, affectionate, and modest person, extremely popular with both men and women. Typically enough, he made light of his own slight affliction of stammering, which somehow added to his charm.
While a student in Germany he met an American girl, Virginia Morton, who was visiting Europe, and on March 9, 1887, they were married in New York. They had two children, Eleanor Morton and Harry Howard.
