Major General Albert Maver Winn (April 27, 1810 – August 26, 1883) was an American carpenter, military officer, politician, labor leader, Odd Fellow, Freemason and founder of the Native Sons of the Golden West.

General Winn not only made his contributions to the civil and military beginnings of Sacramento, he was a prime mover in the fraternal and religious life of his community as well.

It was at the Battle of Buena Vista when other American units began to be overrun by the Mexicans that Col. Davis gave the now-famous order, "Stand fast, Mississippians!"

[4] Winn was also the Secretary of the Phoenix Engine Fire Company and later President of the Master Carpenters and Joiners Society of Vicksburg.

[5] To further cement the ties of the civic population in the growing town of Sacramento, Winn went about organizing the Independent Order of Odd Fellows.

[5] Having established and organized the arts and craftsmen and burghers of Sacramento, Winn worked to cement the contracts and union of the various commercial enterprises.

Together with his financial bakers in the city, and flush with profits from the gold trade, Winn and his associates began the establishment of Grace Episcopal Church in Sacramento during August 1849.

With his associates in the Episcopal Church and senior officers of the Odd Fellows, Winn helped charter and establish the Freemason's Tehama Lodge.

With the full support of the Odd Fellows, joined by the Masons and Grace Episcopal Church, the first hospital was established in California at Sutter's Fort.

Nonetheless, because of his considerable achievements in the prior two years, and his previous military experience in Mississippi, Winn was appointed an officer in the California State Militia.

Although the influx of Americans like Winn helped put California on a road of civilized progress, large numbers of indigent and foreign persons also arrived whose morals were considerably less grounded.

uring the Squatters Riots of 1850, Winn issued a Proclamation declaring Martial Law and brought 500 members of the State Militia to patrol the streets of Sacramento City to guard against further civil unrest.

During the Cholera Epidemic of October - November 1850, Winn used his entire stock of lumber making coffins to bury the dead at his own expense.

The Division was successful in limiting the number and location of saloons, establishing hospices and treatment centers, and publishing articles on the dangers of alcoholic and narcotic uses.

He was consistently rebuffed, and despite the success of the Know-Nothings in the growing Republican movement which he supported, the rise of sectarian issues between North and South and Free and Slave complicated and ultimately divided the associations he had worked to establish.

Finally, he was instrumental in forming the Building and Trades Council of San Francisco which later went on to be a founding organization of the American Federation of Labor.

This initial society failed because the boys were too young to face the combination of hostility from big business and criminal discrimination from foreign ethnic political machines.

So instead, he cultivated the members and in 1875 successfully rallied master craftsmen and small farmers in perfecting and establishing the organization which later became known as the Native Sons of the Golden West on July 11, 1875.

Speaking of his object in organizing the Order General Winn said "For twenty years my mind had been running on some lasting style of monument to mark and perpetuate the discovery of gold I could not think of anything that would not perish in course of time.

"[6] The following year, in honor of the centennial, he organized the descendants of the Revolutionary War to march in the Independence Day Parade at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco in 1876.

The Masons whose precepts he had so well adhered to, the Odd Fellows he had served so long and so faithfully, and the ministry of Grace Church he had helped to found might well have conducted his funeral, but this honor was given to the Native Sons of the Golden West who laid their Brother-Founder to rest under the ritual of the Order which gives back the body of the fallen son of California to the soil of his native state.

The monument, erected in 1888 and restored in 2003 by Sunset Parlor #26, is a granite shaft fifteen feet high in the Pioneer Section of the Sacramento Historic City Cemetery.