USA > Illinois > Cook County > Chicago > Historical review of Chicago and Cook county and selected biography, Volume II > Part 16
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eight years to Geauga county, where the Fish and Peabody grand- parents of Williston Fish were close neighbors for a great many years.
Job Fish was the principal of the school at Berlin Heights more than thirty years. He was and is a philosopher and a wonderfully inspiring and wise teacher. From him Williston Fish received the greater part of his education. In 1876 he entered Oberlin as a fresh- man and in the spring of 1877 he won a competitive examination for West Point, defeating thirty-four competitors. He received his ap- pointment to the United States Military Academy through Charles Foster, at that time congressman, and later secretary of the treasury. He was graduated high in the West Point class of 1881, his best standing being in mathematics, law and language. He was commis- sioned second lieutenant of the Fourth United States Artillery and served at Fort Point, California; Fort Trumbull, Connecticut, and Fort Snelling, Minnesota. While at Fort Trumbull he began the study of law, and in 1887 he resigned from the army and came to Chicago. In 1889 he began his street railway work with the South Chicago City Railway. The road was a small one, and this was fortunate, for it gave him useful experience with all parts of the busi- ness. He was admitted to the Illinois bar. In 1899 he went to the newly organized Chicago Union Traction Company, and did an im- mense amount of work in connection with the operation and with the legal and business difficulties of that company, and in connection with the organization and installation of the Chicago Railways Company. He is now assistant to the president of the new company.
At the time Mr. Fish was in the army there was but little military work going forward, and he did a great deal of writing-800 or 1,000 pieces of prose or verse-the greater part of which appeared in Puck and other papers of the kind and in Harper's. He wrote short stories of West Point and the army, called "Short Rations," originally pub- lished in Puck and republished by Harper's. A prose piece that he wrote, called "A Last Will," is known all over the country. He wrote the serious sonnets called "Time," which appeared in Harper's Magasine. As a writer in certain fields there is no doubt that Willis- ton Fish is a master.
September 22, 1881, Mr. Fish was married to Gertrude, daughter of Dwight F. Cameron, one of the leading railroad lawyers of the
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state. They have three children, Cameron, Gertrude and Josephine. The family resides at 5114 Madison avenue. Mr. Fish is a member of the Calumet Golf Club and of the Chicago Press Club.
As attorney for the Sanitary District of Chicago, a position to which he was elected June 10, 1907, as successor of E. C. Lindley, JOHN C. WILLIAMS. Mr. John C. Williams has the direction and legal charge of matters which concern the people of Chi- cago as closely as those of any other department of the public service. The Drainage Canal, begun some fifteen years ago as a necessary undertaking for safeguarding the city's health has, since its completion in 1900, assumed a vastly increased import- ance directly affecting the welfare and contributing to the financial benefit of every resident of Chicago. As legal adviser for the sani- tary board Mr. Williams has been given a place of great responsi- bility, since upon his decisions and aggressive upholding of the rights of the district depends the value of the canal and its commercial de- velopment as the rightful property of the people who built it.
Mr. Williams was qualified for his present position by thirteen years of practice in Chicago and by previous experience as assistant attorney for the Sanitary District. He was born on a farm near Lime Springs, Iowa, May 8, 1873, a son of Owen E. and Ann (Thomas) Williams, natives of Wales, the father having been born in 1835 and the mother in 1837. They came to the United States about 1858, locating in Racine county, Wisconsin, about 1870 remov- ing to Howard county, Iowa, in which county the father died in 1901, after spending his active years in farming. John C. Williams was educated in the public schools of Iowa and South Dakota, graduating in 1891 from the Aberdeen (S. D.) high school. While pursuing his high school course there he supplemented his resources and added to his experience by teaching two terms of country school, being but sixteen years old at the first term. In 1892, coming to Chicago, he entered the Chicago College of Law (the law, department of Lake Forest University), from which he graduated in 1894, being ad- mitted to the Chicago bar in June of the same year. During the fol- lowing four years he was in the office of Dent and Whitman, and in 1901 began practice alone. In 1904 he formed a partnership with Emery S. Walker, and they practiced together one year. In March, 1906, Mr. Williams received his appointment as assistant attorney
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to the Sanitary Board, and a little more than a year later was elected by the board to his present position. Mr. Williams is a Republican, and served as a member of the Forty-fourth general assembly, 1905-06. He married in 1896 Miss Lillian F. Whipple, of Evanston. where they reside with their two children-Gladys, born in 1898, and Helen, born in 1900. Mr. Williams affiliates with Evanston Com- mandery, No. 58, K. T., and is a member of the Evanston Club and the Hamilton Club of Chicago.
Like many other leading and honored citizens of Chicago. Judge Judson Freeman Going, of the municipal court, is a native of the state of Illinois. His birthplace was a farm near Ga-
J. F. GOING. lena, in Jo Daviess county, in a district distinguished in history as the home of the great silent soldier. President General Grant, and that dean of diplomats, Elihu B. Wash- burn. On November 29, 1857, our future jurist first saw the light. His father, Adoniram Judson Going, was descendant from and closely related to families of celebrated educators and philanthropists, and his mother, Mary A. Clendening, also of cultivated and superior de- scent, was a woman of fine spirit, strong character and unusual quali- ties of mind and heart. His father dying in 1869, left the care and training of the lad to the maternal parent, and thoroughly and well were these duties and obligations discharged.
In the decade following the war the country educational institut- tion was the "district school" and the only available avenue open to the rural youth of that era for the larger education that the ambitious sought. To this the boy was sent for the rudiments, and here he mastered them. When in 1873 the family removed to Chicago, and the doors of the city schools invited the young students to enter, he availed himself of their advantages and thus and therein fitted him- self to teach in the country schools in the neighborhood of the metro- polis of the lakes. But thirst for knowledge such as his could not be quenched except at large fountains, and later we discover him a stu- dent entering the State University of his native Illinois. This splen- did public institution of liberal learning had then begun to give evi- dence of its great possibilities under the magnificent regency of Dr. Gregory, one of the foremost educators of his generation, who strengthened its already capable faculty, enlarged its equipment and laid foundations broad and deep on which are built the present ample
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state establishment at Champaign. The alumni of the State Uni- versity bear abundant testimony by their achievements in state and nation, in the learned professions and in financial and commercial life, of the character of the training with which they were there endowed. In those days the acquisition of a university course meant vastly more of labor and sacrifice than it suggests in these times of universal college opportunities. Thus the young stu- dent, under the inspiration of his devoted mother and by his own efforts, won his education and at once put into service what he had acquired. After his graduation in 1883 he took up the study of the law. His systematic course was obtained in the Union College of Law, from which, in 1885, he was graduated with the degree of LL. B. and within a month thereafter he was admitted to practice in the supreme court of Illinois. Since that time he has with character- istic industry and intelligence applied himself to the successful prac- tice of his profession. Not long after his admission to the bar he was appointed by Governor Richard J. Oglesby a justice of the peace, and was reappointed at the expiration of his term, resigning, with a splen- did record, to accept the appointment of trial lawyer in the office of the late Judge Joel M. Longenecker, then state's attorney of Cook county. Until December, 1892, he filled, with high credit, this im- portant position, when he became associated with Hon. Charles G. Neely, who was afterwards for eight years circuit court judge of Cook county. For upwards of three years following 1894 he acted as gen- eral counsel for the Calumet Electric Street Railway Company and from December, 1904, until his election to a full term of six years to the municipal court judgeship, he was assistant state's attorney . under Hon. John J. Healy, having charge specifically of the indict- ment department.
Judge Going has always been deeply interested in local govern- mental affairs. He has particularly given of his thought and time to a study of all matters pertaining to the welfare, representation and public service of his home ward and division. In politics he has ever been an active and consistent Republican, and for many years he has been among the leading managers and workers in the former Twen- tieth (the present Twenty-fourth) ward. He is a member of a num- ber of prominent bodies, clubs and societies, among them being the Chicago Bar Association, Illinois Athletic Club, Marquette Club,
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ASTOS LEWE AND
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Royal League, National Union, Columbian Knights and the Masons. His sympathies have always been strongly enlisted in behalf of every movement in aid of juvenile dependents, delinquents and defectives. and he is a director of the Chicago Boys' Club.
Judge Going's home life has been ideal. On July 16, 1885. he was married to Miss Gertrude Avery, of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and three children, Grace, May and Judson Freeman Going, Jr., have come to them. The judge for a number of years has been the leader of a class in the North Division which bears his name. He has also been and is a prominent member and officer of the Fullerton Avenue Presbyterian church.
John P. McGoorty, of Chicago, is an able member of the bar, a leader of the state Democracy, and a citizen who has impressed the JOHN P. force and straightforwardness of his character upon McGOORTY. the legislation and institutions of Illinois. Ile was born in Ashtabula county, Ohio, in the year 1866. and when he was four years of age his parents, Peter and Mary Mc- Goorty, moved with their two children to Berlin, Wisconsin. There the boy attended the public schools until his seventeenth year, when he went to work in his father's grocery store. In 1884 he went to Colorado for his health, but returned to Berlin the following year. and entered the employ of Stillman, Wright and Company as book- keeper and later as traveling salesman.
In 1886 Mr. McGoorty became a Chicago resident, and four years later resigned his position with the Wisconsin firm, but continued to sell flour on commission in order to meet the expenses of his legal education, which he had commenced at the Chicago College of Law. In 1892 he graduated from that institution as president of his class. The following year he took the post-graduate course and was given the regular degree of LL. B. On November 30th of the same year he married Miss Mary E. Wiggins; so that it is a doubly significant ycar of his life. Since his graduation Mr. McGoorty has been en- gaged in active practice, interspersed with his activities in politics and reformatory work in connection with both the municipality and the state. He is now the senior member of the well known law firm of McGoorty and Pollock, and one of the faculty of the Lincoln Law School, where he lectures on "Negotiable Instruments."
Mr. McGoorty's prominent connection with politics and public
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life commenced in 1895, when he became the Democratic candidate for alderman of the old Thirty-fourth ward. In 1896 he was elected to the state legislature from the Hyde Park district, and was re- elected in 1898, 1904 and 1906. During his first term in 1897 he became conspicuous by his fight against the Humphrey and Allen bills and as the Democratic minority leader he successfully urged the repeal of the Allen law. At the same session he secured a solid party vote against the Berry bill, whose effect would have been (had it become law) to make Illinois a state promoter of trusts. In 1899 and 1905 Mr. McGoorty came to the front as a strong champion of various bills authorizing the municipal ownership and regulation of gas and electric lighting plants. Although these measures were defeated as a whole, their agitation resulted in legislation by which Chicago is au- thorized once in five years to fix a maximum price for light, and which at once was the means of reducing the price of gas from one dollar to eighty-five cents per thousand feet. In the session of 1905 Mr. McGoorty was also a leader in the movement which placed the charitable institutions of the state under civil service rules, and dur- ing the sessions both of 1905 and 1907 earnestly and effectively op- posed the machine leaders in favor of the present direct primary law. It should also be recorded that he has been a supporter of recip- rocal demurrage bill, the fellow servant bill, the coal miners' bill and other measures of a kindred nature which do not directly affect his municipal constituents. He has always stood for an efficient but economical and honest administration of all the state institutions and departments, being one of the most faithful and useful members of the legislative committee which investigated the condition of the state charitable institutions in the early part of 1908. Mr. McGoorty was the author of the Chicago Charter Convention bill, and an active member of the Chicago Charter Convention. His record as a legis- lator and a man has earned him the repeated endorsement of the Legis- lative Voters' League, and in August, 1908, he was a candidate for the Democratic nomination for governor of Illinois, and the only candidate of his party indorsed by the Illinois Federation of Labor and the United Mine Workers of America.
Mr. McGoorty is a member of the American, State and Cook County Bar associations, and is identified with the Iroquois, Jefferson, City and Chicago Athletic clubs. He is also connected with the
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Royal League, Knights of Columbus, Catholic Order of Foresters, and Ancient Order of Hibernians. He resides at 6204 Kimbark ave- nue, his domestic circle consisting of his wife and four children.
Charles Solon Thornton, senior member of the firm of Thornton and Chancellor, and acknowledged to have been one of the most CHARLES S. efficient corporation counsels who ever served the city, is a native of Massachusetts, born in Boston,
THORNTON.
1851. His parents were Solon and Cordelia A. (Tilden) Thornton, born respectively in New Hampshire and the Old Bay state. He therefore had the natal benefit of sturdy and cultured New England ancestry, and his physical characteristics and mental organization indicate as much. When the boy had mastered the ele- mentary branches in the public schools of Boston he entered the famous Boston Latin School, which has guided the youthful mental training of so many national characters, and after faithfully pursu- ing a six years' course therein became a student of Harvard Uni- versity.
Graduating from Harvard College with the degree A. B., Mr. Thornton decided to make the city of Chicago his future home, rea- soning, as did many other far-seeing men, that there lay before it a brilliant period of reconstruction, which presented to those who could see the opportunities for personal development not found elsewhere in the country. While in college he commenced the study of the law and took a two years' course in the Roman and in the English law. Upon graduation he entered the Boston Law School and con- tinued there until March, 1873, when he came to Chicago, and, con- tinuing his studies in the office of Isham and Lincoln, passed his ex- amination for admission to the bar before the supreme court in Sep- tember, 1873. Immediately thereafter he opened an office in Chicago and entered into practice alone. At a later date he entered into part- nership with Justus Chancellor, which connection still continues, and the firm of Thornton and Chancellor has become one of the most prosperous and professionally substantial in the city. The firm has made a specialty of corporation and real estate law, although Mr. Thornton also made for himself a high reputation in the trial of ser- eral important criminal cases. Perhaps the most notable case of this character in which he has been engaged was the Rand McNally- Williams' embezzlement and forgery matter. Appearing for the de-
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fendant, he delivered a speech to the jury of two days' duration at the conclusion of a trial which lasted six weeks, and his earnestness, zeal and eloquence won the case and added to his already high repu- tation as a jury advocate. The bulk of the cases which he has con- ducted, however, have involved large property or corporate interests, and he is recognized by the bar and real estate men as an authority on all matters connected with that class of litigation. Care and pre- cision mark the preparation of all his cases of whatever nature, his thoroughness of preparation insuring a convincing and clear presen- tation of whatever subject comes before him for adjustment.
In 1888, previous to the annexation of the Town of Lake, which at that time contained one hundred thousand inhabitants, Mr. Thorn- ton was selected for the office of corporation counsel of Lake, and most efficiently served in that capacity. In 1897 he became corpora- tion counsel of Chicago, and in the performance of his duties his pro- fessional courtesy and marked ability gained him general esteem, ir- respective of political affiliations. In the administration of that office he made many changes. He refused to accept for himself and his assistants passes issued and presented by the railroad companies. He reorganized the Special Assessment Department and rigidly enforced a rule permitting no reduction whatever for political or personal fa- vorites in the amount of any special assessments, excepting as ordered by the court after a hearing upon the merits. During his term 3,039 cases in courts of record other than the supreme court were tried, and but sixty were lost. Of 2,355 special assessment cases twenty-nine were lost. In the Illinois supreme court eighty-seven cases were tried, of which seventeen were lost. Of 3,553 legal opinions rendered to the council and several departments of the city government but three were ever successfully attacked.
The corporation counsel passes upon the validity of all claims against the city, and in this line of duty Mr. Thornton was of especial service to Chicago. He rejected claims aggregating over $15,000,- 000 which he thought unjust. Many and powerful interests, both political, business and personal, were often opposed to Mr. Thornton in these matters and were often bitter in defeat. As one instance, a claim of $700,000 was presented by a contracting firm. After months of endeavor the claimants obtained the consent of the finance committee to a settlement of $400,000. Mr. Thornton, whose en-
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dorsement was requested, declined to give it, but when threatened stated to a committee that he would go into court as a private prop- erty owner and enjoin the payment, if such settlement were made. The supreme court sustained his position when it later passed upon the merits of this claim. Many other amounts were saved after simi- lar contests. The bitterness of many of these claimants can hardly be realized, but Mr. Thornton performed his work with an eye only to the welfare of the city and the validity of these claims. Upon retiring from this position Mr. Thornton received from the mayor a letter containing the following unsolicited endorsement :
"In accepting your resignation I desire to congratulate you upon the splendid service that you have given to the city in the past two years. I think it is generally understood among lawyers that the work of the department has never been in as good shape or so thor- oughly cleaned up as it is at the present time, and this condition is unquestionably due to the discipline you have installed in the depart- ment, as well as your own personal ability and industry.
"Please accept my thanks, and as far as I am able to give them, the thanks of the city of Chicago, for the splendid service you have rendered as corporation counsel."
Before 1897, in matters connected with the educational adminis- tration and progress of the county and state, Mr. Thornton had al- ready gained much prominence. In 1889 he was elected president of the board of education of Auburn Park, his place of residence, and later was elected both a member of the Cook county and Chicago boards of education. The governor also honored him with member- ship on the state board. Among other educational reforins and en- terprises placed to the credit of Mr. Thornton are the college prepar- atory course of study and the suggestion of the system of truant schools. His investigation of the Cook County Normal School, with subsequent published observations, led to many needed reforms in that institution, gained wide attention and further strengthened liis standing as an able advocate and promoter of educational reform and progress. In 1895 he also framed the teachers' pension bill, and through his influence it became a law, probably the first of its kind in this country. Both practical and scholarly. Mr. Thornton is ad mirably equipped to take the leading part he has assumed in all mat-
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ters connected with the administration and legislation of the public school systems of city, county and state.
On September 10, 1883, Mr. Thornton was married to Miss Jes sie F. Benton, of Chicago, daughter of Francis Benton, a native of Vermont, and Esther Kimball Benton, a native of Indiana. Mr. and. Mrs. Thornton have four children, whose names are Mabel J., Pearl Esther, Hattie May and Chancellor B. Mr. Thornton is a Knight Templar and a thirty-second degree Mason an an Odd Fellow, and both in fraternal and social circles is welcomed as a genial, courteous and cultured gentleman, whose acquaintanceship soon ripens into enduring friendship.
Elbridge Hanecy, ex-judge of the circuit and superior courts, is among the best known Republicans of Chicago, and as a jurist has
ELBRIDGE always stood in the front rank. He is a Wisconsin man, born on the 15th of March, 1852, a son of HANECY.
William and Mary ( Wales) Hanecy. His parents were both natives of Massachusetts, from which state they removed to Wisconsin about two years before Judge Hanecy's birth. The father served in the Mexican war as a non-commissioned officer and. was engaged in mercantile pursuits in Springfield, Massachusetts, prior to his removal to the west. On his arrival in the Badger state he purchased a tract of land in Dodge county, upon which he con- ducted agricultural pursuits until his death in 1852. The mother afterward married Albert Littell, who served in the war of the Re- bellion and died on his way home after the close of hostilities.
Judge Hanecy acquired his primary education in the public schools of his native county of Dodge, which was supplemented by a course at the College of Milwaukee. He was early attracted by the typical energy and enterprise of the Chicago spirit, and in 1869 came to the city to accept a position with Field, Leiter and Company, his life lines at that time seeming to be drawn along the path of commerce and trade, as were those of his father in his active years. Elbridge remained with the above named firm until the great fire of 1871, subsequently, for a short time, being with John V. Farwell and Com- pany. Finding, however, that his tendencies and strong tastes were toward intellectual rather than purely commercial pursuits, he turned confidently to the law as the most promising field to cultivate.
As a law student the judge first appeared in the office of Hervey,
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