Author: Charles Albert Murdock

Charles Albert Murdock was a California printer, civic figure, Unitarian, and memoirist whose long career connected him with San Francisco publishing and public life. Joseph Hutchinson is a short memorial adopted by the Unitarian Club of California on September 26, 1910. The pamphlet records Murdock’s tribute to Hutchinson and identifies the institutional setting in which the remembrance was prepared. Its compact form differs from Murdock’s broader autobiography, A Backward Glance at Eighty, but both works reflect his interest in preserving the people and associations that shaped California’s cultural development. Murdock’s papers, covering 1871 to 1921, are held by the Bancroft Library and document his business, civic, and religious connections. Joseph Hutchinson belongs to that same documentary impulse, turning a club’s formal act of remembrance into a printed record. The work is therefore best read as a civic memorial by a participant in the community it describes, rather than as an independent biographical study.