William J. Starr was born in 1861 and came to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, as a youth to reside with his guardian, Elijah Swift. He was married in 1886 and in the same year, along with George Davis, formed the Davis and Starr Lumber Company. From this beginning his business interests gradually spread out to other areas of the nation. By 1921 he was president of the Davis and Starr Lumber Company and the Wisconsin Refrigerator Company, secretary of the Eau Claire Book and Stationery Company, owner and operator of an orchard and stock farm in Wisconsin and four farms and a large country estate where the family resided near Easton, Maryland, had large interests in the Steven and Jarvis Lumber Company of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and the Florence-Louisiana Company of Vermillion Parish, Louisiana, and owned extensive timber lands in Wisconsin and California and the Parkdale Apartment Building in Chicago. He was a man of considerable standing in Eau Claire, the leading benefactor of the Christ Church there, president of the Public Library Board, and a member of numerous clubs. He also seems to have had a wide acquaintance in both the political and financial worlds of the time and was fairly intimate with leading Republican politicians.
