USA > New York > New York State's prominent and progressive men : an encyclopaedia of contemporaneous biography, Volume II > Part 12
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There Edwin Alonzo Hartshorn was born on December 19, 1841. His first schooling was in the district school at Peters- burg, after which he attended academies at that and other vil- lages, and then the State Normal School at Albany. He was in the last-named institution when the Civil War broke out, and in August, 1862, he left the school and entered the army as first lieutenant in the 125th Regiment of New York Volunteer In- fantry. From that rank he was promoted to captain, which rank he held when mustered out of service.
His father died when the son was fourteen years old, and he maintained himself for several years at school and elsewhere by himself teaching school, which he did for parts of four successive years. At the close of the war he bade farewell to school and entered into business for himself, engaging with his brother in the baker's trade in the city of New York. Two years later he sold out his interest to another brother, and began the career, in which he has since been engaged, as a manufacturer of flax and hemp twines, yarns, and threads, first at Waterford and then at Troy, and afterward at Schaghticoke, New York. He was one of the incorporators of the Cable Flax Mills of Schaghticoke,
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was long the secretary of the company, and then for several years its president
Mr. Hartshorn has always taken an interest in politics, as a Republican. He was elected a member of the Board of Alder- men while a resident of Troy, and under the administration of President McKinley he was made Assistant Appraiser of Mer- chandise at the Port of New York, which place he now fills, having charge of the Fourth Division, in which the linen and cotton imports are appraised.
Mr. Hartshorn is a member of the Harlem Republican Club, the Central Republican Club, the Grand Army of the Republic, the New York Commandery of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion, and the Society of the Army of the Potomac. He was married, in 1861, to Miss Sarah L. Hovey of Petersburg, New York, who bore him a daughter and a son, Jessie L. and Edwin S. Hartshorn. After nineteen years of married life he was left a widower, and then, in 1882, was married to Mrs. Augusta Vedder of Troy, who died in 1890. In 1898 he was a third time married, to Mrs. Annie E. Valentine of New York city.
Although not a voluminous writer, Mr. Hartshorn has con- tributed to current literature several books, and also magazine and newspaper articles, upon the subject of protection to American industry, labor, and capital, and has materially aided the establishment of that system. He was one of the original managers of the American Protective Tariff League, and has always been active in the affairs of that organization. He was the originator of the "Roll of One Thousand Defenders of American Industry,"which has for many years given the League ample financial support, which he regards as one of the most im- portant secular works of his life.
He has from early manhood been an earnest member of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and has held all the various offices eligible to a layman therein.
CHARLES WALDO HASKINS
THE names of Haskins and Waldo are both indicative of New England ancestry, and in this instance the indication is correct. Early in the eighteenth century Robert Haskins came from England and settled at Boston. By his wife, Sarah Cook, he had a son, Captain John Haskins, familiarly known as " Honest John," who was an associate of Samuel Adams, Joseph Warren, Edward Case, Josiah Quincy, and the other Sons of Liberty, in bringing on the Revolution. John Haskins married Hannah Upham of Boston, a descendant of John Upham, who planted that family in America, of John Howland of the May- flower's company, of Rose Dunster, sister of Henry Dunster, first president of Harvard College, and of Thomas Oakes, cousin of Uriah Oakes, Harvard's fourth president. Their son, Robert Haskins, married Rebecca Emerson, daughter of William Em- erson, a chaplain in the Revolutionary army, and uncle of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Thomas Haskins, son of Robert and Rebecca Haskins, married Mary Soren of Boston, and was the grand- father of the subject of this sketch.
Charles Waldo Haskins was born in Brooklyn, New York, on January 11, 1852, the son of Waldo Emerson Haskins and Amelia Rowan Cammeyer Haskins, his father being a broker and his mother a daughter of Charles Cammeyer, a merchant of New York. He was educated in private schools and in the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, and was intended for the career of a civil engineer. Preferring commercial life, however, he obtained em- ployment in 1869 in the accounting department of Frederic But- terfield & Co. of New York. After five years' service he went abroad for two years for study and travel. On his return he
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entered his father's brokerage office and remained there for some years.
In 1886 he opened an office of his own as a public expert ac- countant, and nine years later he formed a partnership with Elijah W. Sells, under the name of Haskins & Sells. That firm now has a wide reputation throughout the country, and enjoys one of the largest patronages in that line of business. Its engagements include the special examination of accounts for bankers, investors, and large corporations, the periodical auditing of accounts for railroads and other companies, the reorganization of bookkeeping systems for corporations, individuals, and mu- nicipalities, and, in brief, all sorts of expert accounting. When the New York State law was passed establishing a Board of Examiners for the examination of those wishing to become certi- fied accountants, Mr. Haskins was made first president of the board. He is also president of the New York State Society of Certified Public Accountants. In 1893 he was chosen, with his partner, to investigate the accounts of the Executive Depart- ment of the United States government. The work occupied two years, and was pronounced "in many respects the most im- portant undertaking of the kind in the history of the country." His recommendations were promptly embodied in laws for the re- form of the public business. Mr. Haskins was the head of the commission which examined the accounts of the city of Brook- lyn, prior to its consolidation with New York, a work which he performed with characteristic thoroughness.
Mr. Haskins is a member of the Sons of the American Revo- lution, the Mayflower Descendants, the Society of Colonial Wars, the Military Order of Foreign Wars, and has held several important offices in some of them. He also belongs to the Man- hattan, Democratic, and Westchester Country clubs of New York, and the Metropolitan of Washington, and the Piedmont of Atlanta, Georgia. He was married, in 1884, to Miss Henrietta Havemeyer, daughter of Albert Havemeyer, a wealthy New York merchant, whose brother, William F. Havemeyer, was twice Mayor of the city. They have two children, daughters, Ruth, born in 1887, and Noeline, born in 1894.
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WILLIAM HAUBENNESTEL
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THE old homestead of the Haubennestel family is at Arnold- sheim, near Strassburg, in Alsace, formerly a part of France, but now a part of the Reichsland of the German Empire. There generation after generation of the family was born, and there in the last generation Louis Haubennestel was born, on March 30, 1810. In 1828 he came to the United States, and pursued the calling of a maker of, and afterward a dealer in, boots and shoes. He married in New York city, on May 20, 1838, Susan Christina Dietz, who had been born on May 31, 1822, near the city of Karlsruhe, Baden, Germany, and had come to this coun- try in 1836. Her early ancestors were Quakers, who, sometime between 1692 and 1700 were forced to leave the north of Ireland, with others of their faith, and settle in Germany.
Of such parentage William Haubennestel was born, at No. 157 Reade Street, New York city, on October 20, 1840. He was educated in the schools of New York city and of Poughkeepsie, to which latter place the family removed in 1849. Being the eldest of eight children, he was compelled to leave school and go to work at the age of fourteen years, in order to help maintain the family. At first he was employed in a bakery for two years, and then for three years was an errand boy in a clothing store in Poughkeepsie. Finally he decided to engage in his father's occupation. He accordingly took his place upon the shoemaker's bench, learned the trade thoroughly under his father's guidance, and ultimately became his father's partner.
It was in 1866 that the two opened a retail boot and shoe busi- ness in Poughkeepsie, under the firm-name of Haubennestel & Son. The business was continued, with increasing prosperity and enterprise, until the death of the father, in 1890. William
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Haubennestel thereupon took his own son, Louis P. Hauben- nestel, into partnership with him, and thus, without change of name, the business has been continued to the present time.
Mr. Haubennestel's business career was interrupted at an early date by his service in the United States army. He enlisted as a private in Company D, Twenty-first Regiment, New York National Guard, on May 2, 1860, and was successively pro- moted to be second sergeant in July, 1861, first sergeant in July, 1862, second lieutenant in November, 1862, first lieutenant in April, 1866, captain in November, 1866, and major by brevet, for long continuous service, in July, 1876. He was mustered into the United States service at Baltimore, Maryland, on June 27, 1863, for emergency service, and was honorably mustered out at Poughkeepsie on January 7, 1864.
In politics Mr. Haubennestel is a Republican, and he has been chosen by the people for various offices. He was three times elected City Assessor of Poughkeepsie, in 1872, 1874, and 1876; Supervisor of the Second Ward in 1887 and 1888; and Treasurer of Dutchess County in 1894 and again in 1897, for a term of three years each time, his majority in the last election being four thousand.
Mr. Haubennestel is a member of the Nineteenth Separate Company Association, the Dutchess Club of Poughkeepsie, the Millbrook Club of Millbrook, New York, the Masonic Order, the Order of Odd Fellows, the Grand Army of the Republic, the Germania Singing Society of Poughkeepsie, and Beacon Engine Company of Matteawan, New York, and he is an honorary mem- ber of the Hook and Ladder Company of Pine Plains, New York, and of the Veteran Firemen's Association of Pough- keepsie.
He was married to Miss Alice Buys, at Poughkeepsie, on October 10, 1867. His children are as follows: Louis Philip Haubennestel, born on August 16, 1870, graduated from River- view Military Academy, Poughkeepsie, and now partner in the firm of Haubennestel & Son; and Ella Laura Haubennestel, born on February 23, 1873, graduated from the Poughkeepsie High School, and now teacher in that institution.
ARCHIBALD C. HAYNES
ARCHIBALD C. HAYNES, one of the best-known life- insurance men of the country, is of English ancestry. His father's family came to this country about two hundred years ago and settled in New England. His mother's family did like- wise in the early part of the seventeenth century. Of these two families the genealogy is traced in unbroken lines for two hun- dred and three hundred years respectively. Mr. Haynes was born at Saco, Maine, on February 25, 1850, the son of Henry C. Haynes, a manufacturer, and Vesta A. Haynes (born Cooke). He received a good academic education at Groton, Massachusetts, and at an early age entered active business life.
His first engagement was at the age of fifteen years, when he was employed in the office of a selling agent of a manufacturing firm in Boston. He began at the foot of the ladder, as an office boy, and worked his way upward until, at the age of nineteen, he became a traveling salesman. Later he came to New York and became a partner in business with a manufacturer's com- mission house, and remained in that business, with varying success, for several years.
Mr. Haynes's real business career dates, however, from 1877, when he became identified with life-insurance. He began as an agent, soliciting business for the Equitable Life Assurance Society of New York, and with that same great corporation he is still connected. At first, as a solicitor of insurance, he worked alone, and with decided success. In time he brought about him other agents, working under his direction, and thus created and man- aged a general agency. His unsurpassed, perhaps unrivaled, success may be estimated from the simple fact of record that there are to-day several life-insurance companies, of good stand-
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ing, which, after many years' existence, do not know an aggre- gate of insurance in force as great as the amount placed by Mr. Haynes alone upon the books of the Equitable and now outstand- ing to his credit. Of course, there has been much more written by him, of policies which have either lapsed or have matured and been paid. The grand total of all would reach a sum which, if stated, would seem almost marvelous as the work of a single man.
Mr. Haynes has not dabbled in politics, and has given little of his time to club life, the Lawyers' Club being the only one in which he holds membership. He was married, in 1872, to Miss Elizabeth Degraw Conover, daughter of the late Gustavus A. Conover of New York. She died in 1884, leaving him three sons, of whom one is a medical student, one is living in Cali- fornia, and one is in the employ of the general agency managed by Mr. Haynes. In 1892 Mr. Haynes married Miss Minna K. Gale, who had been leading lady in the theatrical company of Edwin Booth and Lawrence Barrett, and who, at the time of her marriage to Mr. Haynes, was one of the most accomplished and admired actresses in Shaksperean and other legitimate parts on the English-speaking stage.
Such, in brief, is the story of Mr. Haynes's life so far as it concerns the general public. For more than twenty years his business energies have been devoted exclusively to life-insurance, with a success that may, without exaggeration, be called monu- mental. Many of the most efficient agents of the present day were trained under him, and the tenor of his operations is indi- cated by the fact that upon the life of a single individual he wrote policies amounting to more than a million dollars.
JOB ELMER HEDGES
A PATRIOTIC ancestry was that of Job Elmer Hedges. His father's father came from England. His father was Job Clark Hedges, an esteemed and prosperous New York law- yer, who entered the national service in the Civil War, became a major in the Fourteenth New York Heavy Artillery Regi- ment, and was killed in battle in front of Petersburg, Virginia, in 1864. The mother of Major Hedges was a member of the well-known Clark family of New Jersey, and a direct descendant of Abram Clark, one of the signers of the Declaration of Indepen- dence. Major Hedges married a member of the Elmer family, also well known in New Jersey, a daughter of Judge Apollos Elmer of Union County. The wife of Judge Elmer, and mother of Mrs. Hedges, it may added, was a member of the Brittin family, which was well represented in the patriot armies in the War of the Revolution and the War of 1812.
Job Elmer Hedges was born at Elizabeth, New Jersey, on May 10, 1862. His education was carefully directed, with a view to his attaining a general culture, and a thorough preparation for the legal profession. He went successively to the Dansville Seminary, at Dansville, New York; then to Riverview Military Academy at Poughkeepsie, New York; to Princeton University, New Jersey, where he was graduated in 1884; and finally to the Law School of Columbia University, New York city, where he was graduated in 1886. In all these institutions his standing as a student and his reputation for manly character were of the highest.
Mr. Hedges was admitted to the bar of New York in 1886. He became a clerk in the office of Hastings & Gleason, of which firm the senior partner had been private secretary to
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Governor Fenton of New York. He was soon, however, drawn into the field of politics and the public service. In 1889 he became a member of the Republican County Committee, and remained a member of it for several years. He was in 1892 the executive member from the Eleventh Assembly District, and was offered reelection, but declined it because it could not be effected unanimously. He was secretary of the Republican State League from 1890 to 1893, and was one of its most active and efficient members. In 1889 and 1890 he was recording secretary of the Republican Club of New York. In 1891 he was a member of the special committee on the reorganization of the Thirteenth Assembly District. After that he became chairman of the committee on organization of the new organization.
Mr. Hedges, on January 1, 1895, became private secretary to Mayor Strong of New York city, and contributed much to the signal success of that excellent administration of municipal affairs. At the end of May, 1897, he resigned to become a city magistrate, for which place his legal knowledge and judicial temperament admirably fitted him. He performed his judicial functions with marked acceptability until the end of December, 1897, when he resigned his place upon the bench to resume the practice of the law. He is now Deputy Attorney-General of the State of New York. He was the assignee of H. H. Warner, the patent-medicine manufacturer. He was associated with Daniel N. Lockwood, United States District Attorney for western New York, in the prosecution of Lester B. Faulkner for wrecking the Dansville National Bank. He was appointed, in the fall of 1899, to take charge of the prosecution of election offenses in the city of New York, such prosecutions resulting in a number of convictions.
Mr. Hedges is a member of the University Club, Union League Club, Princeton Club, and Kane Lodge, Free and Accepted Masons, of this city, the State and city bar associations, Sons of the American Revolution, and Sons of Veterans. He is un- married.
JOHN LINDSAY HILL
AM MONG the immigrants to this country from Ireland "in the good old colony days, when we were under the king," was Adam Hill. He came from the storied city of Londonderry, of the Protestant stock that made Londonderry the center of Protestantism in Ireland, and, reaching America about 1756, settled in New York State. Already agitation against British misrule was becoming acute, and he and his family were no strangers to it. When at last the storm broke, his two sons, Nicholas and Henry, were only ten and nine years old respec- tively. But they at once entered the patriot army as drummer- boys, in Captain Hicks's Fourth Company of the Second New York Regiment. They were at Morristown in 1779-80, and later were protégés of Baron Steuben. Both were at Yorktown, and witnessed the surrender of Cornwallis. The elder, Nicho- las, was a sergeant when he was discharged in June, 1783, his discharge papers being signed by Washington himself. He then settled at Florida, Montgomery County, New York, and was for forty years a Methodist preacher. He was four times married. His fourth wife was Sarah Hegeman, whose father
was Adrian Hegeman, and whose mother's maiden name was Palmer-the one of Dutch, the other of English stock. She bore to the Rev. Nicholas Hill in his old age - he was then sev- enty-four years old -a son who is the subject of this sketch. Another son, by his first wife, born thirty-five years before, was Nicholas Hill, Jr., who was one of the leading lawyers of his time in New York State.
John Lindsay Hill was born at Florida, New York, on Octo- ber 31, 1840, and spent his childhood on his father's farm. He went to school and learned the printer's trade at Amsterdam,
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New York, was prepared for college at Jonesville Academy, Saratoga County, and went to Union College, where he was graduated in the class of 1861, the last class sent out by the ven- erable Eliphalet Nott. For a year afterward he taught school at Waterford, and then was admitted to the bar and began to practise law, for which he had prepared himself by vacation study. He opened an office at Schenectady, New York, in part- nership with S. H. Johnson, and in 1864 was elected District Attorney of Schenectady County. During his term of office he was also counsel for the State Canal Commissioners.
Mr. Hill came to New York in July, 1868, and has ever since been in practice here, making his home in Brooklyn. He was first associated with G. R. and T. D. Pelton, and then for a short time with Henry L. Clinton. In 1873 he became a mem- ber of the firm of Barrett, Redfield & Hill, which later became Redfield & Hill, and then Redfield, Hill & Lydecker. From January, 1884, to March, 1887, he practised alone, and then formed a partnership with Luke A. Lockwood, as Lockwood & Hill, which still exists. He has long been known as a success- ful lawyer. He was associated with some of the most eminent lawyers of the day as counsel for Henry Ward Beecher in the famous Tilton-Beecher suit. He is a Democrat in politics, but has held no political office but that already mentioned, to which he was elected as a Republican during the Civil War.
Mr. Hill is a member of the Alpha Delta Phi Club, and was one of the founders of the Union College chapter of that frater- nity. He belongs to the New York Union Alumni Association, the Phi Beta Kappa Association, the Medicolegal Society, the Law Library Association, the Brooklyn Bar Association, the Sons of the Revolution (of which he is perhaps the only mem- ber who is a son of a Revolutionary soldier), the Long Island Historical Society, the New England Society of Brooklyn, the State Bar Association, the Brooklyn, Carleton, and Montauk clubs, the Wyandauch Club, of which he is president, and the Masonic Order.
WELCOME GEER HITCHCOCK
THE Hitchcock family reckons its origin here from Matthias Hitchcock, who came from London to Boston in the spring of 1635 on the bark Susan and Ellen. The next year his name figures in the records of Watertown, Massachusetts, as a land- owner, and in June, 1639, we find him among the founders of New Haven, Connecticut. Thereafter his name is frequently to be found, in one connection or another, in the records of that colony. He married Elizabeth Perry, and had four children, of whom the second was Nathaniel Hitchcock. The latter married Elizabeth Moss, and had six children, the fourth of whom was a son, John. John Hitchcock married, for his second wife, Abiah Bassett, and had ten children. Of these the eldest, John, mar- ried Esther Ford, made his home at Cheshire, Connecticut, and had ten children, of whom the fifth was named John. This third John Hitchcock married Phoebe Tyler, daughter of Colonel Ben Tyler of Wallingford, Connecticut, moved to Claremont, New Hampshire, of which he was one of the founders, and had fifteen children. The fifteenth of these was Benjamin Hitch- cock, born in 1801, at Claremont. He moved to Montrose, Pennsylvania, and became a merchant. He married there Miss Pamelia Augusta Geer, a native of Kent, Connecticut. Of the collateral branches of the family many members have won dis- tinction in business, statesmanship, literature and scholarship, theology, the army and navy, and in other walks of life.
The second of the two sons of Benjamin and Pamelia Augusta Hitchcock was born at Montrose, Pennsylvania, on October 28, 1834, and received the name of Welcome Geer Hitchcock. He was educated in the public schools, and then came to New York to make his fortune. At the age of sixteen years he became a
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clerk in the furnishing-goods store of J. F. Sanxey in William Street. From that day on he made his own way, never receiv- ing a dollar from his parents or from any one else, save what he earned from his employers. The next year saw him a clerk in the dry-goods store of Carleton & Co. at one hundred dollars a year. The fall of 1854, when he was twenty years old, found him entering the store of Noel J. Becar & Co., import- ers of handkerchiefs, at six hundred dollars a year.
This was not a promising beginning. But the development of it depended upon the young man himself. His devotion to duty, and his aptness for the business in which he was engaged, assured him promotion. The firm of Becar & Co. underwent various changes, but he remained in its employment through them all until 1868. In that year he became himself the head of the firm, of which the name was transformed to that of W. G. Hitchcock & Co. Originally the store was at 187 Broadway. Thence it moved to 342, and thence to 453-455 Broadway. Finally it entered its present quarters at 455-457 Broome Street. The firm has for many years represented a number of leading dry-goods manufacturers, ribbon houses, etc. Mr. Hitchcock has devoted his attention to its affairs above all other interests, and has won a gratifying measure of success.
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