USA > Washington DC > Washington DC > The Biographical cyclopedia of representative men of Maryland and District of Columbia Pt. 2 > Part 25
USA > Maryland > The Biographical cyclopedia of representative men of Maryland and District of Columbia Pt. 2 > Part 25
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ORKIS, JOHN GODLOVE, D.D., 1 .. D., was born in York, Pennsylvania, November 14, 1803. Ilis father, Dr. John Morris, served as a surgeon during the Revolutionary war. His commis- sion, signed by Washington, and other members of the Government, is still in the possession of the family. Ilis son was prepared for college at the York County Acad- emy, and at the age of seventeen was admitted to the Sophomore class at Nassau Hall, Princeton. Here he took the prize awarded to the best declaimer. Afterwards he was transferred by his guardian to Dickinson College, entering the Senior class and graduating in 1822. It was here his attention was first directed to practical religion, and his resolution taken to enter the ministry of the Entheran Church, in whose fold he had been reared. He
accordingly pursued his studies privately for two years and a half, and finished the prescribed course at Princeton Theological Seminary. In October, 1826, he was licensed to preach in Winchester, Virginia, and was soon called to the pastoral charge of the First English Lutheran Church in Baltimore, composed of about thirty families, who had recently erected a small house of worship on Lexington Street. During the thirty-three years he continued here the house was remodelled and enlarged three times, and the congregation so increased that it was necessary to send off two colonies, who established the Second English Lutheran Church on Lombard Street, and the Third on Monument Street. At the end of that period Dr. Morris accepted the position of First Librarian of the Peabody Institute, of which he had previously been a Trustee by the appointment of Mr. Peabody, and spent three years in purchasing books, organizing the library, and bringing it into active operation. He was then elected temporary pastor of the Third Church, and held that position for six years. Since that time he has had no pastorate, but fre- quently preaches in Baltimore and elsewhere. He has received the honorary degrees of D.D. and LL. D., from Pennsylvania College, Gettysburg. In 1846 he attended the World's Convention in London, and travelled exten- sively in Europe. He is the principal founder of the beautiful village of Lutherville, ten miles north of Balti- more, and of the Ladies' Seminary at that place. Dr. Morris has been president of a large number of religious, literary, and scientific associations, and several times of the General Synod of his Church, also, frequently of the Lutheran Synod of Maryland. Since early life his enthu- siastic fondness for zoological studies, necessitating very frequent exercise in the woods and fields, has done mueh to preserve his uninterrupted good health, and his contri- butions to various journals have procured for him mem- bership in numerous scientific associations. They have also brought him into close personal relations with many of the most distinguished scientists of this country, and into correspondence with eminent German and French naturalists abroad. His literary and theological writings and lectures have been read and listened to with great interest. The titles of his published books and pamphlets amount to twenty-six, besides thirteen Review articles. In early life he was for two years editor of the Lutheran Observer. Dr. Morris was elected Professor of Natural History in the Academic Department of the University of Maryland; for some years was lecturer on Zoology in Pennsylvania College ; and is at present Professor of the Connection between Science and Revelation in the Theo- logical Seminary, Gettysburg, where he delivers a course of lectures every winter. He has given courses of popular lectures in different departments of zoology at various in- stitutions of learning and teachers' conventions, and numerous single lectures for the benefit of churches, Sun- day-schools, and benevolent enterprises.
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yCCOY, JOHN W., was born in the city of Balti- more, April 2, 1821. His family has been identified with the city from the close of the last century ; his mother, Sarah Williamson, hav- ing been born in Baltimore, December 20, 1800, when the city had only 26,000 inhabitants. His father, Stephen McCoy, born at Basking Ridge, New Jersey, Feb- ruary 25, 1787, marched in his twenty-seventh year from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, as a volunteer soldier for the de- fence of Baltimore, when assailed by the British in 1814, and remained here a citizen until his death, February 12, 1873; Sarah Williamson McCoy, his wife, surviving him a short time and dying May 26, 1874. John W. McCoy, the subject of this sketch, has himself been identified with Baltimore from his birth. IIe was educated in that city, completing his course at Baltimore College, a department of the University of Maryland. Without the benefit of fortune, but with a solid education, quick faculties, and an acute insight into men and affairs, coupled with untiring industry, he entered the working world at an early age, commencing his career in the office of a popular weekly newspaper. For many years he retained that kind of con- nection, having through boyhood and up to his middle manhood, grown through all the grades of newspaper · service, from a junior clerk or accountant to a writer of editorials. During the many years of this career, amid a taxing, occupation, he found, or rather took time for continuous and systematic study; devoting some hours of every day or every night, without fail, to enlarging his ac- quaintance with history, philosophy, natural science, and belles-lettres. The history of art and the fine arts in all their manifestations have long been with him attractive subjects of continuous observation and study. Mr. McCoy was, up to its dissolution, for many years one of the Board of Governors of the Allston Club, an association organized to create a social life in sympathy with art and letters; and has been one of the Governors of the Athenaeum Club since its foundation in 1877. For thirty-three years he has been a member of the Mercantile Library Association, and was for twelve years continuously elected ta its Board of Gov- ernment, until his absence from the city during the war that began in 1861. With little leisure for club life, or indeed for social life in any form, Mr. McCoy has ever since boyhood taken but scant recreation. An hour or two's walk with a pleasant friend, or alone amid the varied aspects of man and nature, have been his simple and de- lightful restoratives. Work and study, day and night (with never more than a few hours for sleep), made the routine of his life up to his mature manhood. Having always been an earnest thinker on our social life, especially on the various future of the several social ranks in great cities, and with an instinctive sympathy for the helpless, Mr. McCoy was among the earliest members and officers of the ·
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" Baltimore Association for the Improvement of the Condi- tion of the Poor." Before the period when paid agents were
employed to do its work, Mr. McCoy was, for several years, a voluntary unpaid visitor to the poor, devoting personally live or six hours of every day during the winter months to visiting really thousands of them at their homes, where he was brought face to face with every form of distress and destitution. He has often said that no part of his life was remembered by him with the same gladness as these years he devoted to sympathetic counsel with the unfortunate, and as a careful distributor of what the generous public had provided for their help. Apart from his duty as an unpaid visitor to the poor, Mr. McCoy rendered a specially notable service to the cause of true charity, and to the as- sociation which in this city is organized as its channel, by openly opposing a scheme that was popularized during one or two winters, in which contributions were courted by open publication, not only of the givers' names, but of the names and residences of those whose hard lot compelled them to " accept the public bounty. The one end of the scheme would have been to utterly destroy the self-respect of thousands of honest but impoverished people, sick men, sick women, and families anxious for work, but in winter nigh to famishing for want of it. This cruel publication of their names and needs stigmatized the best of them practically as paupers. Public sympathy, however, was stirred by these details; thoughtless contributors were gratified, though the poor whom they wished to help were immeasurably hurt. The association that made no such publication, but had careful and sympathetic men to do its work in privacy and with knowledge, found its funds rapidly declining and its means of solid usefulness coming to an end. In this crisis Mr. McCoy devoted himself to sustaining the association in spite of temporary popular clamor, and by writing and publishing various rational and warm appeals in the newspapers and in pamphlets, to which a broad distribution was given time after time for several years, the judicious public came to clearly understand the noble service the Poor Association was rendering, so that its funds were as steadily replenished as help to suffering had depleted them, until now the associa- tion is a fixed institution in the city, and year by year, summer and winter, is engaged quietly, but effectively, in its beneficent work. Mr. McCoy has for thirty odd years kept his connection with it, and has long been one of its Vice-Presidents. In 1859 Mr. McCoy was made President of two mining companies working for metals in North Carolina, and having their business offices in Baltimore. When the war broke out he had the option of staying quietly at home and abandoning the valuable property of his companies, or of leaving home to develop and protect, upon the spot, in North Carolina, the interests of his friends. His decision was made at once, and sever- ing himself four years from home, he did his simple duty in standing by his work and taking the fortunes of the Confederacy. Without funds, and with one hundred and fifty men in his employ, with the market closed against the
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products of his mines, he yet went through the four years and more, kept the mines actively alive until the close of the war, paid all his company's debts, and brought to market a material surplus for its treasury, To do this Mr. MeC'oy had to really create all his means. Ile made all the iron, of which his need was large, from the ore; built a dam on Deep River for a water-power, working himself day and night in the water, guiding his negro hands; es- tablished furnaces, and trained his simple workmen to make wrought iron directly from the ore, which they did in large quantities, both for mine consumption and for sale. In the mines gunpowder in large quantities was a daily necessary for blasting. But when the war had gone on a few months powder could not be had at any price. Mr. McCoy, without money resources, at once determined not to stop the mine, but to make the necessary powder. To do this he had the dry earth hauled from under every hu- man habitation for miles around; from it by rude, but effective apparatus, he leached the nitrous salts and crys- tallized them into pure saltpetre. Ile excavated furnace chambers in the solid rock, and here, with the rudest utensils, distilled sulphur by the ton from the ores of the region ; burnt charcoal; and finally rigged up a simple powder-mill that, with negro hands only to manage it, under his guidance, made blasting-powder, that through four years tore down thousands of tons of rock and ore. The result was that when the war ended this was the only copper mine alive within the limits of the late Confeder- acy. Mr. McCoy not only made, without financial capital and without any experienced help, wrought iron directly from the ore, but forged bolts, bars, wheel tires, and the innumerable forms of iron necessary to the conduct of a large mining establishment, and made bloom of wrought iron for the market. He made copperas also from the same ore from which he got bluestone, sulphur, and metal- lie copper; and it was from the barter of these products, necessary all over the South, that he got corn and meat to feed the one hundred and fifty men and thirty horses that depended on him for sustenance. He had no foreman or practical guide to help him in any one of these varied manufactures; he had never himself seen any of these articles made, and his sole guide was his previously ac- quired practical scientific knowledge that his determined energy applied with complete success under the most un- promising conditions. When the war ended, in 1865, Mr. McCoy returned to Baltimore, closed his mining connec- tion, and became a partner in the well-known commercial house of W. T. Walters & Co. He is still a member of that firm, but devotes much of his time to the conduct of the Daily Evening Bulletin, a journal which he, in con- nection with a few friends, originated in 1876, and which rapidly attained and has since steadily kept the character of a first class newspaper-able, fearless, honorable, jndi- cious, and conservative. Since its origin, in 1876, Mr. McCoy has been a member of the Harbor Board of Balti-
more, where he is chairman of its only standing commit- tee. Ile has thus had a special share in the guidance of the enormous work of excavation which, under the imme- diate direction of u scientific engineer, has, by the removal of several millions of cubic yards of deposit, converted what was hitherto the shallow estuary of a decaying vil- lage into the deep and spacious harbor of a great commer- cial city. Without this immense work, already done so fully and with such close economy, the enormons growth of the sea-borne trade in breadstuffs, other provisions and petroleum, which has marked the last few years in Balti- more, would have been simply impossible. Mr. McCoy is also in the administration of the State Insane Asylum at Spring Grove, having been appointed by the Governor some years ago to that important trust. His colleagues there have made him chairman of its chief committee, where the daily administration, including shelter, nurture, care and medie cation of upwards of three hundred lunatic patients, and the control of more than forty servants come under the special care of his Executive Committee. Amid a long life of almost incessant labor, Mr. McCoy has found time to keep alive and cultivate an inborn love of art. Pre- vionsly familiar in detail with all worthy art productions of our country, and also with the best foreign work that had been brought here, in 1871 Mr. McCoy made an ex- tended tour in Europe, visiting and carefully observing the great collections at the chief art centres of the world, from London to Rome. He gave also close attention to social matters, modes of living, and methods of economi- cal production. He had long been known as the special friend, defender, and helper of our home artists, who, amid neglect and overborne by unobservant and un- reasoning fashion, had struggled unrewarded and, indeed, almost unknown, year after year in honest and able en- deavor, most of them to produce work that should compel the admiration of their careless fellow-citizens. It is now a settled fact that Hovenden, Quartley and Jones are artists of high rank, and steadily rising to still higher places. Mr. McCoy has been for years the steadfast friend of all these gentlemen, and has of their works, and of many other artists, principally American, an excellent collection of more than fifty pictures. Of the late William 11. Rinehart, the distinguished sculptor, Mr. McCoy was a steadfast friend for nearly twenty years. Mr. McCoy wrote, in 1858, for a daily newspaper in Baltimore, the first line of editorial commendation Rinehart's work ever received anywhere. This earnest article brought the sculptor and his work first before the public, and, as year after year added fresh proofs to Rinehart's genius, it was the pen of Mr. McCoy that uniformly and continually in- troduced them to the intelligent favor of his fellow-citi- zens. Rinehart's incomparable chef d'œuvre, the marble statue of " Clytie," having been brought by him to Balti- more, where Rinchart earnestly wished it to remain, as the very best work he had made or was capable of. The
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figure was about to leave the city, as the property of an owner living out of Maryland, when Mr. McCoy promptly stepped forward, bought it at the artist's own price, and presented it, in an appropriate setting, to the perpetual cate of the Peabody Institute, as a noble work of art for hee exhibition in Baltimore forever. Mr. Mccoy has since bought and shown freely to the public an admirable bust of Christ, by the American Sculptor, Ezekiel, now residing in Rome. All the odds and ends of time Mr. McCoy could command in the past three years, have (amid a pressing mass of business every day), been devoted to building up his private library, which is now not only one of the most extensive in Baltimore in point of volumes, but by far the fullest of any private library here in the elements of English and American history, in general philosophy, in illustrated topography, in natural science, and in the history and productions of the fine arts. His collections of American, English, French, German, and Italian engravings, representing pictures, statuary, and gems, is without a local rival, and is the result of years of careful labor backed by the cultivation necessary to such a task. Mr. McCoy is descended, on his mother's side, from John Williamson and Jane Parker, his wife, both of families long established in the North of Ireland; whence the Williamsons came to America during the Irish political troubles in 1795, and settled in Baltimore in 1797. On his father's side, Mr. McCoy is descended from Gowan MeCay, a Scotsman, who, in 1709, settled in Northern New Jersey, at that time a wilderness; then, in the next generation, from Gowan McCoy (second), of Basking Ridge, who commanded a troop of New Jersey horse in the Revolution; then, in the next generation, through Thomas McCoy (a Revolutionary soldier of the line), and Phœbe Cary (of Somerset, N. J.), his wife. These were the parents of Stephen McCoy, the father of John W. Mr. McCoy is now in full health in spite of forty odd years of almost unbroken work ; he has an easy but not extravagant fortune; lives simply ; is glad to join in all good endeavors for the public welfare; gives the larger part of his time now to public duties; is content with his lot; glad to help his fellows; fond of his friends; proud to see the city of his birth growing in power ; much more proud to see her people growing in cultivation ; and with a cheerful philosophy, is ready to meet whatever duty or whatever event the coming years may have in store for him.
2 B LACKISTON, DAVID CRANE, son of James and Mary (Crane) Blackiston, was born, February 19, GLÚ JJ J 1809, at his hereditary family cstate, Brighthelin- stone. He was educated in Kent County, Mary- land, devoted himself to agricultural pursuits, and was appointed in 1850, by Governor Enoch Louis Lowe,
one of the Judges of the Orphans' Court of Kent County. In 1859 he was elected to the Senate of Maryland, served five sessions, and was present at the critical meeting of that body in Frederick City in 1861. He was a member of the Constitutional Convention of 186; was appointed in 1870, by Governor Oden Bowie, Inspector General of grain ; and in November, 1873, was elected Clerk of the Circuit Court for Kent County, Maryland, the position he now fills, with great satisfaction to the bench, the bar, and the public. He married, April 4, 1837, Rachel Mott Hooton, who was the daughter of Andrew and Mary ( McKenzie) Hooton, and had the following children : Katharine Amanda, Mary Jane, Andrew Hooton, and David James, who married January 26, 1870, Elizabeth Bruce, daughter of Colonel Robert Bruce, of Cumberland, Maryland. David Crane Blackiston is an Episcopalian, as all his ancestors, paternal and maternal, were before" him, and in politics a Democrat.
ENT, STOUTER WARREN, M.D., was born, January 15, 1806, in Gilbert Swamp, Charles County, Maryland. His father was Hatch Dent, farmer of the above county. He was a man of remark- able memory and a liberal member of the Protestant Episcopal Church. He died January 10, 1816. The doctor's mother was Susan, daughter of Stouter Edwards, who was at one time a clerk of St. Mary's County. She died when her son was very young. Tradition tells of three Dent brothers who came from England at the be- ginning of the seventeenth century. One located on the Potomac near Pope's Creek, another near the Pamunkey River, and another, the one from whom the doctor de- scended, settled in Gilbert's Swamp, on an estate called " Dent's Inheritance." After attending various schools young Dent, in 1821, was sent to Charlotte Ifall Academy, St. Mary's County, where he remained for two sessions, when he was compelled on account of ill health, to abandon his studies and return home. In 1823 he became a clerk for Bennett Hammit, of St. Mary's County, with whom his stepmother had contracted a marriage. In the ensuing year he re-entered Charlotte Ilall Academy. Experiencing a severe attack of pneumonia, during which his friends had difficulty in procuring proper medical at- tendance, he came to the conclusion to study medicine, and after convalescing, returned to the Academy, where he applied himself particularly to the study of the Latin language, under the direction of Philip Briscoe, then prin- cipal of the institution. He evinced remarkable powers of memory, and rapidly acquired a knowledge of the Latin grammar, being able in a short time, to repeat by rote, the whole of its rules, etc. In 1826 he entered the office of Doctors Ridgely and Redont, in Annapolis. At the expi-
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ration of twelve months he became a student in the office of Dr. Calistus Lancaster, Charles County, where he re- mained a year. In the fall of 1828 he matriculated at the University of Maryland, and attended one session. In the spring be returned home, where he was detailed by different circumstances until the autumn of 1830, when he re-entered the University, and graduated therefrom in the spring of 1831. Immediately after graduating he established himself in the practice of his profession at Gilbert Swamp, in which he has been continuously engaged up to the present time. Ile was for ten years a magistrate in his native county, and served as one of the Judges of the Orphans' Court of Charles County for eight years. Ile was reared in the old Whig party. Since 1860 he has voted with the Democratic party. In 1833 he joined the Methodist Episcopal Church, in which he has been a steward and exhorter. He has been twice married, first to Miss Lydia B., daughter of Daniel and Ann Watts, of St. Mary's County, January 5, 1830. She died January 13, 1831. On June 5, 1832, he married Miss Mary Catharine, daughter of George and Mary Smoot, of Charles County. He has by the last marriage, eight children living, three sons and five danghters. Dr. Dent has been one of the foremost men in his county in educational matters. In 1838 a general education bill was passed for Charles County, and largely through his instrumentality. He was made one of the School Trustees, and energeti- cally exerted himself in making the public schools effec- tive. Ile served as School Commissioner for his county from 1854 until the breaking out of the civil war.
ycDOWELL, CHARLES CORFIELD, M.D., was born in the town of Waverly, Oswego County, New York, March 28, 1851. When he was three years of age his parents removed with him
to Baltimore. Charles there attended various schools, receiving his principal education at the Baltimore City College. In the nineteenth year of his age he entered into mercantile business, pursuing the same for two years ; at the expiration of which period he commeneed the study of medicine. He matriculated at the University of Maryland, in the fall of 1872, and graduated therefrom in the spring of 1874. Soon after receiving his diploma he went to Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, to establish himself in his profession, but on account of the turbulent condition of affairs there; attributable to the lawless action of the " Molly Maguires," he remained in that section but six months, and then returned to Baltimore, September, 1874, and entered regularly into medical practice. The above year he was appointed one of the attending physicians at the Dispen- sary of the Baltimore Infirmary, the duties of which posi- tion he satisfactorily performed for three years. During
the period of his professional service in that institution, he had charge of the Department of Diseases of Women and Children, and of Thoracic Diseases. The doctor is au active member of various medical societies, including the Medico Chirurgical Faculty, of Maryland; the Baltimore Clinical Society, and the East Baltimore Medical Society, having been elected Recording Secretary of the latter in January, 1877. He has furnished many valuable papers on medical and scientific subjects, to the societies and the leading journals, among which may be mentioned one on " Ilygienic Treatment of Uterine Diseases ; " one entitled " Music as a Therapeutic Agent; "' also one on the " Treat- ment of Pelvic Cellulitis." Dr. McDowell is now, and has been for two years, Medical Examiner to " Arbeiter Kranken Unterstutzungs Verein " (the Workingmen's Ilealth Association), and Examiner for the Virginia Mutual Protection Association, of Richmond, Virginia. He attends to general practice, but gives special attention to the dis- eases of women, which his ample experience in, at the Bal- timore Infirmary, and during the years he has pursued his profession, make him thoroughly conversant with. Dr. McDowell's father, Doctor William S. McDowell, is an eminent and skilful Doctor of Dental Surgery in Balti- more. His grandfather was a distinguished officer of the United States Navy, in 1812, and his great-grandfather served in the American Revolutionary war. Dr. McDowell occupies a high rank in his profession, and is regarded one of its most talented and accomplished members. His man- ners are those of the thorough gentleman, and are caleu- lated to attach to him all with whom he is brought into personal relation.
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