USA > Maryland > Men of mark in Maryland Johnson's makers of America series biographies of leading men of the state, Volume IV > Part 4
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He was admitted to the bar and began the practice of his pro- fession in 1880, in Baltimore. He practiced law alone for a time, and that he made reputation is proven by the fact that he was taken in as a member of the law firm of Cowen, Cross and Bond. headed by that eminent lawyer, John K. Cowen; and the name of Bond has always stood high in legal circles in Maryland. This partnership continued up to the death of Mr. John K. Cowen, when it was dis- . solved, and since that time Mr. Cross has practiced alone. He has been one of the general counsel for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad "since 1892, a period of nineteen years-and this fact alone testifies to his legal ability. He has also been counsel for the Maryland Trust Company; the Western Union Telegraph Company, and various other large corporations.
. - An incident in Mr. Cross's career worth noting is the fact that during his attendance upon the law school, he also read law in the office of Cowen and Cross, and it is a notable fact in connection with
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the eminent lawyers of this country that those who have had the benefit of study in some strong lawyer's office have in nearly every instance made their mark later in life. It seems to supply a need which cannot be filled by the schools.
Outside of his law studies, Mr. Cross has been particularly partial to historical and biographical matter, and general literature of standard authors. He is a member of the Maryland State Bar Association, and the Presbyterian Church. In a political way, he has through life been an Independent. Seeking no political position himself, he belongs to that class which is too intelligent to wear the party collar, and which in these later years has been a most potent and beneficial factor in the political life of the country.
Mr. Cross is fond of outdoor sports and gets his recreation in that way.
An interesting feature of this family is the average long life of its members. It will be noted that Mr. Cross is the eighth in line from John Cross (I), who was born in 1559-three hundred and fifty- two years ago. The average family in this country able to trace its descent from 1559, would find ten to eleven generations.
There are three coats of arms belonging to the Lancashire Crosses. That each of these coats of arms was granted to members of the same family is proven by the fact that the same design appears on each one that used by the family of Liverpool and Chorley being the most complete. It is also of some interest to note that a branch of the original family was located in the old home in Wigan as late as 1842, when-Thomas Bright Cross, of Shaw Hill, was member of Parliament for Wigan.
C. WILBUR MILLER
C. WILBUR MILLER, president of the Davidson Chemical Company, is a young man not yet thirty-four, who has already made a most substantial success in the way of a career. Mr. Miller was born at Shepardstown, West Virginia, Feb- ruary 17, 1878; son of the Reverend Durbin G. and Sarah J. (Van Brosius) Miller. Mr. Miller's father was of German and Irish de- scent, and represented the fourth generation of clergymen in his family. He was devoted to his church, and especially careful in the matter of the education of his children, whose success was to him one of the dearest things of life. In the maternal line, Mr. Miller is of Dutch descent, his mother's people coming to America from The - Hague, in Holland, in the early part of the last century. In looking back to his boyhood years, Mr. Miller recalls that his mother was always his closest friend and his guide in all matters. As a boy, he was fond of outdoor life of every kind, and reared mostly in small towns and suburban communities found vent for nis athletic tastes, which added to his naturally strong physical body. Coupled with .his.love of outdoor sports was also a love of reading-history, biog- raphy and poetry being especially attractive to him. He went to Marston's School, John Hopkins University, and the University of Maryland. He was graduated as bachelor of laws from the law * department of the University of Maryland, in 1899, and entered the
law office of Bond and Robinson. His business career began even in his early youth, for while a law student he served as cashier of the New England Mutual Life Insurance Company in their Baltimore office.
. Six years after he entered the practice of law, on June 14, 1905. he was married to Miss Edith Davison, daughter of Calvin T. Davison then president of the Davison Chemical Company; and of this marriage there are four children.
Shortly after his marriage, Mr. Miller's father-in-law died, and 'in January, 1906, it seemed wise for him to lay aside his profession
- and 'take up the active management of the Davison Chemical Company, of which he was elected secretary in January; 1906. He
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discharged the duties of this new and untried position with such ability that five years later, in January, 1911, he was elected presi- dent of the company, which is now the largest manufacturer of sulphuric acid in the world, having three large plants in and near Baltimore.
Mr. Miller takes a keen interest in many things. He has been a member of Troop A, of the Maryland National Guard; holds membership in the Kappa Sigma College Fraternity; the Maryland Club; the Baltimore Country Club; the Merchants Club; the Green Spring Valley Hunt Club; the Baltimore Yacht Club; the Chemists Club of New York, and the Automobile Club of America. He is a communicant of St. Paul's Parish of the Protestant Episcopal Church. He is secretary and treasurer of the Manufacturing Chemist Asso- ciation of the United States; member of the manufacturing com- mittee of the Merchants and Manufacturers Association, and a member of the Baltimore Chamber of Commerce. He retains his youthful fondness for all outdoor games. While at college he played football and tennis, and yet finds much pleasure in horseback riding and hunting.
The career of this young man presents a very strong case of American adaptability. Educated for the law, and with slender business experience, he was able to step into the shoes of an experi- enced manufacturer and carry forward, very large interest success- fully. Evidently his business ability is of a high order, and he has made the most of it by being careful in the selection of his associates. Mr. Miller has made it a rule of life to be careful in the selection of those men with whom he associates upon anything like intimate terms-and he believes that one's success in life is largely dependent upon this fact. In politics, he is an Independent which may be put down on the credit side of his account, because it is to this element in our citizenship that the country already owes much, and is likely in the future to owe much more. He believes in good counsel, and does not hesitate to seek advice on proper occasions. After weighing carefully all the pros and cons, and giving due credit to the sources from which the counsel comes, he believes one should then make up his own mind-and having once made it up, allow nothing to swerve him from the decision. He does not fear opposition or obstacles. The stronger the opposition, the greater the difficulty, the more credit attaches to the man who overcomes.
CHARLES NEILSON
C HARLES NEILSON, of Maryland, whose life for more than forty years has been identified with the transportation inter- ests of the country, in which he has held many important positions, is a native of Maryland, born in Harford County, on July 19, 1849; son of James Cranford and Rosa (Williams) Neilson. In the maternal line, Mr. Neilson is descended from two very old Mary- land families, the Stumps of the Western Shore, founded by John Stump, of Stafford, Harford County; and the Williams of the East- ern Shore, who have been prominent in both parts of the State for many generations. The Stumps belong to those German and Swiss people who came from the Palatinate between 1735 and 1740,-the old records showing Casper Stump as one of the band that came over in 1738. These Palatines of Middle and Western Maryland, of Central New York, and of South Carolina, were conspicuous in the Revolutionary period by their devoted patriotism and their sturdy courage, and these qualities have abided with their descendants to the present day. The Willams family were mostly of Welsh origin. In one of the ancient Episcopal parish records of Central Maryland, it is noted that the subscriptions to the church were made in tobacco, and Thomas Stump subscribed two hundred and fifty pounds. On the paternal side of the line, Mr. Neilson's name presents a very interesting study. The family traces back to the ancient Scandi- navians who emigrated to Scotland and Ireland. Some British - genealogists claim that the Scotch name is derived from the old · sire name of Nigel, and that it is a softening down of Nigel's son, and that the Irish family is derived from the Scotch. That the Irish family of Neilson is derived from the Scotch admits of no question, because the coat of arms now preserved by the family of Mr. Charles Neilson is the ancient coat of arms possessed by the Neilsons of Craigcaffie and Craigeau. The probabilities appear to be that the British genealogist who derives the name from Nigel is in error, and thatthe Neilson name in Scotland dates back to that period when the Scandinavian Vikings were making incursions upon the Scottish
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and English coasts thirteen hundred or fourteen hundred years ago, and it is known that many of these Vikings settled in the British islands. This is the most probable derivation of the Neilson family in Scotland. Mr. Neilson's immediate family was founded in America by his grandfather, who came from Ireland, in which country the family occupied honorable station, ranking with the gentry. James Cranford Neilson, father of our subject, was in early life engaged in the construction of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad as an assistant engineer under Latrobe, one of the greatest of our early railroad engineers, and later in life Mr. Neilson became an architect in Balti- more. He was a man of fine character and great attainments.
Charles Neilson was a healthy youngster; his boyhood life spent mostly in the country; fond of horses; and obtained his education in various private schools in Harford County and in Baltimore. He studied engineering and railroad construction under his father, and in 1865 began his business career in Baltimore in the oil business, learning how to manufacture oil. He stuck to the business two years, but did not like it, and abandoned it to take up engineering, which was his natural bent. He had previously had a taste of surveying and construction work, which had fixed his purpose. As a railroad man, he began his work on the Northern Pacific Railroad, where he spent five years in construction work. From this, he went to the Erie, where he spent twelve years in the transportation and mechani- cal departments. At the end of that period, he had so established himself as a man of capacity in his chosen profession, that he was called to the Cincinnati, Hamilton and Dayton as general manager, where he remained eight years, retiring from the Cincinnati, Hamil- ton and Dayton to go to Washington as Second Assistant Post- master General in Cleveland's second administration.
While attached to the Erie Railroad, Mr. Neilson had come in contact with Grover Cleveland and his law partner, Bissell. When Mr. Cleveland became President of the United States he made Mr. Bissell his postmaster-general; and they asked Mr. Neilson, during Mr. Cleveland's second administration, to take the position of second assistant postmaster-general. Though the acceptance of this place involved a sacrifice of his personal interests, Mr. Neilson took up the work and had entire charge of all the transportation of the postal department during his term. He installed the pneumatic tube and the street car postal service in the larger cities, and remodeled the
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entire railway postal clerk system. In this way he has by valuable service rendered fully paid his footing as a good citizen. Aside from this, though a lifelong Democrat, he has never sought public position, and this came to him unsought.
After his term of public service expired he was for a time connected with the Queen Anne's Railroad on the Eastern Shore and then became a transportation expert.
He served for a term as a member of the Fifth Maryland Regi- ment and on General Richard Carr's staff; and in 1869-70, while engaged on the Northern Pacific, he took an active part in the Indian troubles in Minnesota, known as the "Blueberry War." And also in the beginning of the trouble with Sitting Bull which culminated in the Custer Massacre.
Mr. Neilson is a member of the Episcopal Church, but he would probably not pay his church dues now in tobacco, as old Thomas Stump did one hundred and seventy-five years ago, though he admits that he would like to so do.
Since his retirement from the Queen Anne's Railroad, Mr. Neil- son has been identified with steamboat transportation and with railroad construction and expert work. His boyhood fondness for horses has remained with him through life, and he finds his pre- ferred form of recreation in handling good horses.
On October 22 1878, Mr. Neilson was married to Elizabeth Holmes Harrison. Of the three children born to them, two are living.
For thirty years past Mr. Neilson has been in the very thick of the fray of that remarkable industrial development in which this country has set the pace for all the world. In looking back over his career, he'can see where in his anxiety and eagerness to achieve results for the great interests by which he has been employed, he has . 'overlooked the proper care of his own and his family's interests- and this is not an unusual experience.
He believes a young man, having once made up his mind as to what vocation he will follow, should adhere tenaciously to his pur- suit; practice economy; and associate, in so far as may be possible, with successful men, for he regards this as a most valuable asset. Of course, one of the conditions of this association is that he must from time to time be able to take some part in the business ventures with these successful men, therefore one can see the necessity for careful economy and of some available substance in hand.
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Mr. Neilson is a man of strong character, which can readily be understood when one notes the strains of blood which converge in him-Irish, Scotch, Welsh, German, Scandinavian; for to all these he owes something. These virile races today control the world; and Charles Neilson is in himself a fair illustration of the quality of the men from whom he is descended.
Mr. Neilson is at the present moment vice-president of the Co- lumbia National Steamship Line, which will operate passenger and freight steamships between the United States and the Republic of Columbia. The line is owned in Columbia where the president lives, and will sail under the Columbian flag. Mr. Neilson has put much strenuous labor into this effort to develop trade with some of our South American neighbors and has had the usual experience that the greatest difficulties have been occasioned by the evil deeds of the carpet baggers who have brought us into the same evil repute in Latin America that the Northern carpet baggers acquired for the northern section of our country by their plundering of the helpless South after the Civil War.
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HARRY TURNER NEWCOMB
H ARRY T. NEWCOMB, senior member of the law firm of Newcomb, Churchill and Frey and known to most Amer- icans as an authoritative writer on questions of economic and political science, makes his home at Bethesda in Montgomery County.
Although by adoption and by choice Mr. Newcomb has become a true son of Maryland he has reason to be proud of his long and dis- tinguished New England lineage. He is, in the paternal line, in the ninth generation from Captain Andrew Newcomb who settled at Boston in the early years of the Massachusetts colony, probably about 1635. Lieutenant Andrew Newcomb, son of the emigrant, was one of the original proprietors of the town of Edgartown on the Island of Martha's Vineyard, was commissioned as lieutenant in April, 1691 and had command of the fortifications at Edgartown during the same year. Benjamin Newcomb, grandson of the second Andrew and born at Edgartown, after residing in Lebanon, Connecticut, for nearly fifty years, became, in 1761, one of the original grantees and founders -. of the town of Cornwallis, in Nova Scotia, whence he had removed with his family during the previous year. One of his sons, William Newcomb, ancestor of the subject of this sketch, was also one of the original grantees. and founders of Cornwallis but returned to his former home in Connecticut during the War of the Revolution. A grandson of William Newcomb, born in 1799 and named George Washington Newcomb, was a Presbyterian clergyman, with charges in New York and Michigan and his son, Henry Martyn Newcomb, is the father of H. T. Newcomb. Henry Martyn Newcomb, an alumnus of Williams College and of the University of Michigan, is a man of high personal character and great intellectual independence. He served as prosecuting attorney and judge of probate for Keweenaw County, Michigan, as circuit court commissioner of Mason County, Michigan, and as collector of customs at Ludington, Michigan.
In the maternal line, Mr. Newcomb's grandfather, Honorable Josiah Turner, also of Connecticut aneestry running back to a very
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early colonial period, was a most distinguished jurist who served the State of Michigan, between 1845 and 1885, in every judicial rank from that of justice of the peace to justice of the Supreme Court of the State. Josiah Turner's wife and Mr. Newcomb's grandmother, was Eveline Ellsworth, daughter of Dr. William Chauncey Ellsworth of Saint Albans, Vermont, whose father was Oliver Ellsworth, a member of the celebrated Connecticut family from which came that other Oliver Ellsworth who was successively member of the Constitutional Convention of 1789, Senator from Connecticut, author of the Fed- eral Judiciary Act and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Mr. Newcomb was born at Owosso, Michigan, on January 4, 1867 and educated in the public schools of that State, graduating from the high school at Ludington at the early age of fourteen years. Even prior to the completion of his high school course he had been under the necessity of earning part of his own support and had given his vacations and much of the time not spent in school to such work as he could obtain. During the next ten years he was successively employed as printer's apprentice and helper, reporter on a weekly paper, clerk and assistant bookkeeper for a manufacturing concern, clerk in the offices of the Chicago, Milwaukee and Saint Paul Rail- way Company, clerk in the city post office at Washington, D. C., and confidential clerk to the auditor of the Interstate Commerce Commis- sion. The last named employment came to Mr. Newcomb through the interest of the late Judge Thomas M. Cooley, the first chairman · of the commission and he regards as especially fortunate that during seven years in that office he became successively acquainted with and enjoyed the friendship of its three great chairmen, Judge Cooley, Hon. William R. Morrison and Judge Martin A. Knapp. While employed by the Commission Mr. Newcomb found time to pursue special studies in the evening classes of Columbian University (now George Washington University) and later to take a course in the Law Department of the same institution from which he received the degree of LL.B. in 1891 and that of LL.M. in 1892. Before entering upon the practice of the law, Mr. Newcomb's further services to the fed- eral government included several years spent in charge of important statistical investigations for the Department of Agriculture and the organization, in the capacity of expert chief of division, of the Agri- cultural Division in the Office of the Twelfth Census. He also spent
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two years as editor of the Railway World, a leading trade paper devoted to the economic aspects of railway transportation.
As a lawyer, Mr. Newcomb's training and experience have natur- ally led to some specialization in those matters of litigation in which the principles of industrial and political association impinge upon and illuminate the science of jurisprudence. A notable instance was the wholly extra-legal arbitration of the anthracite strike of 1902, before the commission headed by Judge Gray, in which Mr. Newcomb was of counsel for the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company and filed the only printed brief and argument on behalf of the oper- ators received by the Commission. Another instance occurred in 1905, when after taking five volumes of testimony the committee on Interstate Commerce of the United States Senate called upon Mr. Newcomb in association with Professor Henry C. Adams, head of the Department of Political Economy in the University of Michigan, to analyze the testimony and to report their own conclusions as to facts and principles not fully or satisfactorily discussed by the wit- nesses. Matters of constitutional and industrial law, connected with legislative control of railways, public service corporations, pro- ducti. e enterprises and the law of taxation have also, and for the same reason, received a large share of Mr. Newcomb's attention.
Outside of his profession, Mr. Newcomb's reading has been exten- sive and of wide range but his especial interest, from a very early period, has been in history, economics and political science. Answer- ing a question as to the books and writers which have most influenced his work and opinions, he named the Bible; Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations; John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy, and Herbert Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy, in the order given. He is a member of many of the leading scientific societies of the World, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Economic Association, American Statistical Association, American Political Science Association. American Academy of Politi- cal and Social Science, Royal Statistical Society (British), American Society of International Law and Washington Economic Society. He has been president of the latter and also of the section on Politi- cal and Social Science of the American Association for the Advance- ment of Science.
For many years Mr. Newcomb has been a frequent contributor to the principal reviews, particularly to the North American Review,
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The Forum, The Review of Reviews, The Engineering Magazine, The Yale Review, The Harvard Law Journal, Political Science Quarterly, Popular Science Monthly and The Journal of Political Economy. Addresses and papers, made or written by him are to be found in the published proceedings of the American Association for the Advance- ment of Science, the American Economic Association, American Statistical Association and elsewhere. In 1895, he published a book Railway Economics, which has been used as a text-book in most of the great universities, and in 1900 another The Postal Deficit. Until forced, by pressure of business, to abandon that character of work, Mr. Newcomb gave a lecture course in statistics at Columbian University and for many years he gave a short course on transpor- tation law in its Law Department. He has lectured on legal or economic questions at the University of the City of New York, Johns Hopkins University, Lehigh University and the University of Mis- souri.
On October 11, 1893, Mr. Newcomb was married to Lucy Theodora Comstock, daughter of John E. and Emma J. (Wheeler) Comstock, of Owosso, Michigan, and also of New England ancestry. Ten children have been born to them, of whom nine, seven girls and two boys, are living. In politics Mr. Newcomb is a Democrat, and although he has no politicl aspirations of his own he takes an active interest in getting out the vote of his party at every election and in every legitimate effort to promote the success of its candidates and poli- cies. While he regards a party as a means to secure good and patri- otic ends and declares that he would not hesitate to vote and act independently if convinced that his party had ceased to be a means to such ends, he, adds that so far he has found no reason to doubt that, in Maryland and in the Nation, the Democratic party is the best available instrumentality for obtaining wise, efficient and eco- nomical government.
Mr. Newcomb is fond of travel and has personal familiarity with local conditions in substantially every state and territory in the Union which he has acquired by investigation on the spot, supplemented by a wide acquaintance among the leaders of thought and of industry throughout the Nation. His principal out-door activity is horse- back riding which he combines with the supervision of his farm and of the breeding of Shetland ponies and other blooded stock in which he is intensely interested. He is a member of the Cosmos Club, Uni-
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