USA > Ohio > Crawford County > A centennial biographical history of Crawford County, Ohio > Part 27
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born in 1839 and was killed in a sawmill near Spencerville, in Van Wert county. Ohio, in July. 1870: John, of this review; Mary Ann, who was born in 1842 and is the wife of Robert Park, their home being now in the southern part of Crawford county ; Margaret Ann, wife of Freeman L. Corey, of Osce- ola county, Michigan ; Calista Jane, wife of Edward Pangborn, a resident of Leavittsburg, Ohio; Harry L., of Galion; Elizabeth, wife of Henry Boltz, a resident of Wood county, Ohio; Minerva, wife of Adelbert Farnsworth, who is living in Galion ; David Allen, of Fayetteville, Missouri ; and Nelson Bar- nett, who is residing with his family at Akron, Ohio. Samuel English, at the age of forty-eight, enlisted in the Fuedelier Regiment, of Chicago, and in two months was discharged, and, returning to Galion, he re-enlisted, in April, 1862, in Company K, Twenty-third Ohio Volunteer Infantry, and served three years, when he was honorably discharged. He and three sons all came home safe, excepting our subject, who was seriously wounded.
John English was born in Johnsville. Morrow county, Ohio, on the 9th of April, 1840, and throughout his entire life has resided in the Buckeye state. He remained in Blooming Grove until he was ten years of age, and then accompanied his parents on their removal to what was known as the Adam Christman farm, four miles west of Galion. There he aided in the work of field and meadow, performing his share in the labors of the old home- stead, and in response to the call of President Lincoln for troops for the defense of the Union, on the Ist of March, 1862, he enlisted as a member of Company D, Twenty-third Ohio Volunteer Infantry. At the battle of An- tietam, on the 17th of September of that year, he was seriously wounded in the leg and the following month the member was amputated. In conse- quence of this serious loss which he had sustained, he was unable to do active service and was honorably discharged on the 3d of March, 1863, and re- turned to his home. For ten years after the war he was in the employ of the Erie and Big Four Railroad Companies and for twelve years following his retirement from railway service he acted as notary public in Crawford county. At the present time he is engaged in the confectionery business in Galion, where he has a large and well-selected stock, his store being neat and attractive in appearance. He is enjoying a liberal patronage and his business is constantly increasing.
Mr. English has been twice married. In Galion, on the 18th of No- vember, 1870, he married Miss Maria Noblet and unto them were born five children, but only one is now living, Anna May Burgener, now a resident of Galion. After the death of his first wife Mr. English wedded Miss Mary C.
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West, a daughter of Montreville West, who resided at Marsailles, Wyandot county, Ohio, where he died in the year 1857. For thirty-eight years he has been a continuous resident of Galion and is a citizen of sterling worth, who commands and enjoys the respect and confidence of his fellow men by reason of his fidelity to duty, and he is in the highest and best sense of the term a gentleman, courteous in manner and in his own home is considerate and hospitable. He made for his country a great sacrifice and therefore is en- titled to the everlasting gratitude of the nation for the part which he per- formed in preserving the Union.
REUBEN O. MORGAN.
Reuben O. Morgan is one of the native sons of Galion, his birth having occurred in this city on the 2d of September, 1873. His father, George Morgan, was born in Webster, Darke county, Ohio, and is now a resident of Bellefontaine, Ohio, being employed as a passenger engineer by the Big Four Railroad Company. In the city schools of Galion the subject of this re- view pursued his education until sixteen years of age, when he entered the service of the Big Four Railroad Company. After a year he was promoted to the position of telegraph operator and acted in that capacity until 1896, when he resigned the office in order to engage in the coal business in Galion. He dealt in that commodity until 1898, when he was appointed superintendent of the Galion Gas Light Company, in which capacity he is still serving. Every business change which he has made has been a promotion, with increasing responsibility and increasing income. These attest the merit of the man and his advancement is a deserved tribute to his inherent worth. As the manager of the Galion Gas Light Company he has shown himself to be a man of su- perior executive force, keen discrimination and sound judgment, and the en- terprise is meeting with prosperity under his care.
In 1895 Mr. Morgan was joined in wedlock to Miss Grace Bryan, a native of Galion, and they now have a pleasant home in the city, which is celebrated for its charming and gracious hospitality.
HERMAN HENRY HARTMAN, M. D.
In the subject of this review we have one who has attained distinction in the line of his profession. He has been an earnest and discriminating student, and he holds a position of due relative precedence among the medical
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practitioners of this section of Ohio. He is now successfully practicing in Galion, where he has a large and distinctively representative patronage.
The Doctor is a native of this city, his birth having here occurred in 1869, his parents being A. H. and Catherine ( Bohl) Hartman. For forty years the father has been engaged in business as a druggist of this city and is one of the most prominent representatives of commercial interests here. He is a native of Germany, whence, in early life, he came to America. His wife was born in Polk township, Crawford county, a daughter of Henry Bohl, one of the honored pioneers of that township, now deceased. He. too, was a native of the fatherland, and on coming to the new world cast in his lot with the early settlers of this portion of Ohio. The Doctor pursued his pre- liminary education in the common schools, and supplemented his studies there by a course in the Capital University, at Columbus. Determining to make the practice of medicine his life work, he began study in Columbus, and was graduated at the Columbus Medical College with the class of 1890. He after- ward pursued ? post-graduate course in the polyclinic of New York, com- pleting his studies there in 1893. He then began practice in Jacksonville, Ohio, where he remained until 1896, when he returned to Galion. He has been very successful in following his chosen calling, his success resulting from his skill and ability, his comprehensive knowledge of the principles of medical science and his correct methods in applying remedies to relieve the suffering of his fellow men. As the years have passed his patronage has steadily increased in volume and importance, and he has kept in touch with the advanced thought and progress of the day.
Dr. Hartman has always been quite prominent in public affairs. While residing in Jacksonville he was a candidate of the Democracy in 1895 for the office of representative in the state legislature. He was also elected mayor of Jacksonville, and was filling that position at the time of his re- moval to Galion, resigning in order to take up his abode in the latter city. He is now serving his second term as health officer of Galion, and since 1898 he has been city physician. His political support has ever been given to the Democracy and he takes an active interest in its work, laboring untiringly and effectively for the adoption of its principles and the election of its can- didates.
Dr. Hartman was united in marriage to Miss Effie L. Woodworth, of Athens county, Ohio, a daughter of C. Woodworth, a merchant, who is now deceased. Their marriage has been blessed with two interesting little daugh- ters,-Mary and Alma. The Doctor is connected with the German Lutheran
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church. He and his wife enjoy the high regard of many friends in Galion, and the circle is constantly increasing as their acquaintance is widened. He is a gentleman of strong mentality, marked individuality and sterling worth, and his prominence in his chosen profession is a merited tribute to his inde- fatigable labor and ability.
STEPHEN R. HARRIS.
Hon. Stephen R. Harris, who was born on his father's farm seven miles west of Massillon, Ohio, May 22, 1824, sprang from patriotic stock. His grandfather was John Harris and his paternal grandmother Mary Hamilton. The former was a soldier in the army of Washington and dis- tinguished himself at the battle of Monmouth, where his brother-in-law, John Hamilton, was killed beside him.
The subject of this biography worked on the farm and attended district school until fourteen years of age, when he started out for himself. He was employed as a clerk in a store at Canal Fulton, Stark county, about four years, attended a select school at Dalton, taught by John W. Rankin, afterward a distinguished lawyer and a partner at Keokuk, Iowa, of the late Justice Miller, of the United States supreme court. In 1842 he was a student in the preparatory department of Washington College, Pennsylvania, which institution recently conferred upon him the honorary degree of Master of Arts. In 1843 and 1844 he studied in Norwalk Seminary, under the late Edward Thomson, bishop of the Methodist Episcopal church. For the next two years he was a student in the classical department of the Western Reserve College, at Hudson. In the winter of 1846-7 he taught school at Canal Fulton.
Having by this time acquired a liberal education through his own un- aided and persistent efforts, he entered upon the study of law in the office of his uncle, John Harris, a pioneer lawyer of ability, at Canton. After reading under instruction for two years he was admitted to the bar in the spring of 1849, and on the 14th day of June of that year opened an office for practice at Bucyrus. From that time to the present, more than half a century, he has continued to practice at the same place. He became the law partner of the late Judge Josiah Scott in 1850, and the partnership was con- tinuous until the death of the latter in 1879, except for the period of Judge Scott's service on the state supreme bench. Mr. Harris served as deputy United States marshal and member of the county military committee during
Stephen R. Hanrio
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the war. He was elected, in 1894, to represent his district, which has been strongly Democratic, in the fifty-fourth congress of the United States, and was the candidate of his party for re-election in 1896, but the free-silver sentiment and fusion of the Populists were sufficiently strong to defeat the ticket. Mr. Harris has been a Republican ever since the organization of the party, and prior to that was a Whig.
He has, however, given his chief thought to the duties of his profession, and has for years stood in the fore front of practitioners in Crawford county. His reading is deep and broad: he is successful in the trial of cases, and remarkably successful in the argument of cases before the supreme court. It has become proverbial in the bar where he is well known that if Mr. Harris has the slightest ground for appeal or error to the higher courts his adversary may as well give up at once, because he nearly always wins in the appellate court. He holds the esteem of his brethren at the bar and the confidence of the courts. His methods are such as to commend themselves to the best and most respected members of the profession. He also stands well in the highest political circles, and his personal popularity rests upon merit.
He was married September 15, 1853, to Miss Mary Jane Monett, who died in 1888, leaving two sons and two daughters, offspring of the union.
He has been very successful as a financier, and as a result is a man of large possessions. He is quite an extensive landed proprietor in the state of Ohio and Iowa. As an amateur sportsman he is a frequent contributor to the Turf, Field and Farm, and Forest and Stream. Now, over seventy- five years of age, he is an excellent shot on the wing, either in the open or from the trap.
Mr. Harris was one of the original members of the State Bar Associa- tion, and has been an active member from the beginning, serving as president of the association in 1894. He is now chairman of the committee on legal biography. As a public speaker he is clear, logical and convincing, rather than eloquent. He entertains decided views on all question of political importance or popular interest. The following is an extract from his annual address delivered in 189.1. before the Ohio State Bar Association, of which he was then president :
STRIKES.
"Another topic I approach with diffidence, for the reason that no ex- pression has been uttered on the subject by our Association. What the views of our members here assembled may be are unknown to me, but I
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cannot refrain from expressing my own feelings and convictions, whether they be acceptable to this Association or not. I allude to the growing state of anarchy to which our beloved republic is rapidly drifting under the un- checked growth of communism, which takes the specious form and name of so- called strikes. Thousands upon thousands of laborers have had ample em- ployment with good living wages, on the railroads, in the mines and manu- facturing establishments of our country. On the other hand there are triple the number of honest laborers in miscellaneous pursuits, uncertain in their nature, liable to fluctuate in wages and of uncertain duration, such as the common day laborer. The latter class may well envy the miner, the railroader and the factory hand. They would gladly change places for the same wages, but what state of things confront them? They are met and repulsed by strikers, who voluntarily go out themselves and refuse to permit the other laborers to take their places.
"Here we see the work of the seditious demagogues with political aspira- tions and a burning desire for notoriety. With incendiary eloquence they seek to embitter labor against capital, when they well know that labor and capital are mutually dependent on each other. They tell the laborers, who are the strongest numerically, that they are abused and oppressed by their employers, at times when the laborers are well compensated and contented. They incite discontent and resentments where none existed before. They arouse the dormant passions and cupidity of the laborer. They frame and formulate organizations and societies for them, and incite them to strike down and ruin their benefactors. They dupe their followers with the doctrine that capitalists and corporations are powerful and oppressive, but fail to tell the other truth that a host of hostile and unreasonable laborers are also oppressive and dangerous. The result is that they have prevented the running of railroad trains, they have tied the hands of property owners, they have closed factories and they have shut up coal mines on which private families, factories, railroads and steamers on our navigable waters depend for fuel. They have impeded the carrying of mails and have inflicted untold injury, either directly or indirectly, upon every business pursuit.
"For the vacant position of every striker there are three equally honest laborers with families in need of their earnings, who are ready and willing to go to work, but the horde of strikers, under the instructions of designing leaders, sullenly and forcibly repulse every non-union laborer who ventures to start the train, to open the mine or set the idle machinery to running in the
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factory, and that to the extent of assassination, if necessary, to carry the point. There can be a tyranny of labor as well as a tyranny of capital.
"Suppose a change of places. Imagine an employer who would discharge a laborer and at the same time say to him, 'I will neither give you employment nor permit you to work for anybody else.' The same designing and insidious leader who first inaugurated a strike would be ready to turn around and incite the rich against the poor, if he could thereby obtain political power and notoriety. A demagogue in a republic and a courtier in a monarchy are the same. They both fawn and flatter the governing power for the sake of personal gain and notoriety. The designing orator and demagogue who in- cite a happy and contented class of well paid laborers, as well as the poor who are out of employment, to mutiny against their employers and benefactors; who make inflammatory speeches to convince them that the rich have no other designs than to crush the poor, deserves to be classed with the bloody an- archist and should, like him, be stamped out by the government for its own protection. The organized strikers compose less than one-third of the laboring men of the United States, and of them a considerable majority are foreigners. Our land has been latterly made the receptacle into which foreign nations have dumped their paupers and criminals. The honest, intelligent, industrious, law- abiding foreigner will, in the future, as in the past, be welcome to our shores. We see the neatness and thrift of the Germans, who have clad these lovely islands with their vines, and, like Werhle, have beautified them with struc- tures. I allude to these people only in words of praise, but, unhappily, statistics show that class of immigration to be on the wane, and in their stead we are flooded with dangerous criminals like the Italian bandit, born with a stiletto in his hand.
"This republic has been kind to the laboring man. Political parties have vied with each other as to which could best promote his interests. Under congressional legislation the Chinese, with their cheap labor, have been ex- cluded in the interest of the American laboring man. The construction of the Union Pacific Railroad was completed by Chinese labor, and the same class can live, work and thrive on wages that would starve an American laborer and his family. Hence they have been excluded purely for the benefit of com- pensatory wages for Americans.
"The legislature of Ohio has enacted laws peculiarly beneficial to the laboring classes. It protects wages against the homestead and other exemp- tions of the debtor. It gives them priority over all others in case of their employers' failure. It gives them mechanics' and workmen's liens on struc-
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tures of all kinds, and our courts construe all those laws liberally in the interests of the mechanics and laborers whose work is in the structures. I would go farther: I would have our legislature and our courts protect the honest laborer, who, seeking employment, finds a vacant place with an em- ployer ready and willing to set him to work, but finds himself met, halted and threatened, not by the owner of the property, but by a striker who has vacated the position, stopped the business, depreciated the property of his former employer and now forbids a fellow citizen to work when his services are needed and the wages offered are satisfactory. It becomes at this point an issue, not between employer and employe, but it is the oppression of one class of laborers against another class. It is the tyranny of those who abandon their work and deprive other worthy and needy laborers of employment. It pre- sents the spectacle of an unreasonable and tyrannical class of laborers ar- rayed against another and less favored class seeking employment.
"Personally, I am not interested in the conflict between the strikers and their employers. I allude to it without personal feeling for either class. In fact I have a friendly feeling for the laboring man. 'I have been there myself.' The first money I ever earned for myself was by chopping wood for forty cents a cord. I have a sympathy with the laboring man, and especially for one who is out of employment and kept out by another. I have no especial affec- tion for an unreasonable capitalist. I am not in love with George M. Pull- man. I have on sundry occasions 'blowed in' two of the silver dollars of our fathers for the privilege of a sleep in one of his cars. I have also helped enable him to pay his taxes and keep up his style of living by adding the tribute of a quarter of a dollar toward the wages of his colored porter. We have all done the fair thing by George. In fact we have been liberal toward him almost to a fault : consequently he has no preferred lien on our affections. The state of our feelings, however, has little to do with the subject under consideration. The constitution of our own state as well as the federal con- stitution is broad enough to support appropriate legislation to remedy these evils : to practically afford equal and exact protection to the poor against the rich : to protect the property of the rich against mob violence: and, what appears to be more needed at the present time, to afford protection to one class of laborers against the tyranny of another class.
THE MISSION OF LAWYERS.
"In all the political history of our country, when emergencies have arisen, lawyers were depended on to guide legislation, to frame treaties and to
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draft acts of legislature so that they might be in conformity of law. De Tocqueville, that accurate and sagacious observer of our country, as early as 1835, wrote these remarkable words: 'I cannot believe that a republic could subsist at the present time if the influence of lawyers in public busi- ness did not increase in proportion to the power of the people.' Thirty of the fifty-five members of the convention which framed the federal constitution were lawyers, and all of those who put it in proper legal shape were lawyers. Of all the United States senators since 1787 two-thirds have been lawyers, and of the entire number of representatives more than one-half were lawyers.
"While it is true that men of other vocations have been useful and per- haps indispensable as legislators, because of their knowledge and experience in the various wants, industries and business interests of the country, yet upon the lawyers rested and still rests the responsibility of framing laws to meet and protect those wants and business interests, that they may stand when contested in the courts. Ludicrous results sometimes appear when the work of lawyers is left out. In Kansas at one time the people sat down on the lawyers and elected a granger legislature. The session laws of that year sub- sequently faded away like mists when they came before the courts. In one circuit they elected a granger judge who was down on lawyers. He refused to render decrees for the foreclosure of mortgages, giving as a reason that times were too hard and no foreclosures could be had in his court until times improved. In one case the supreme court rendered a decree of foreclosure and sent a mandate to the granger's court, but the same judge refused to obey the mandate, refused to carry the judgment into execution and was, I believe, attached for contempt by the supreme court. In lowa they had a similar ex- perience as to the transitory character of granger legislation. A joke was once scored against the legislature of Ohio, when, by the act of March II, 1875, they made it unlawful to spear fish through the ice between the Ist of May and the Ist of September. A similar joke came near passing into our last legislature when an act went through one house which empowered a justice of the peace to appoint receivers for railroad companies who failed to pay the squire's judgment with due promptness. 1
"My friends, the longer I have practiced law the more do I learn to admire the profession to which I have the honor to belong. A lawyer de- voted to his profession has little other thought than to study his cases in the interest of his clients. He seldom stops to reflect upon his calling or view it from an outside standpoint. A bar association with its periodical meetings has a beneficial tendency to relax his labors for the time being, and to afford
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him the opportunity to exchange views with his fellow members of the legal profession when they are met together socially, and not in the heat of litigation at the bar. Upon the lawyer rests the responsibility of managing and directing the highest and most important business interests, the rights of persons, the rights of property, including in many instances the domestic relations. When I speak of lawyers I have no reference to that small class who have crept into our profession, who grovel in the dregs of dishonorable practice, the shysters,- a set of turkey buzzards, whose touch is pollution and whose breath is pesti- lence. To such a class drifts dishonest litigation. If a man has a crooked case he naturally hunts a crooked lawyer to manage it. I desire on the contrary to bring my tribute to the higher class of our profession. I mean the honorable, conscientious lawyer, who has many important privileges conferred upon him, and who in turn has many important duties to perform. He acts with fidelity to his client and with courtesy to the court, gives all the light and aid he can to honorably advance the interests of his client. He discourages useless and discreditable litigation. He investigates his client's cause and promptly tells him if it be true that he cannot defend or recover, as the case may be, and ad- vises a settlement or compromise. While such a lawyer may forego a fee for the time being he will build up a reputation for honesty that will ultimately flood him with business of a meritorious character, in which he himself will have confidence. On such a lawyer will the business man rely, when complica- tions arise and his property is in jeopardy. To him will the testator in con- templation of death send to write his last will and testament. On him will the widow and orphan depend when designing men seek to deprive them of their patrimony, and the lawyer who would prove false to such a trust, and himself become the robber, deserves to be expelled from the bar in his life- 'time after his death go where the worm dieth not and fire is not quenched, -and that, too, without any obituary notice by our committee on legal bi- ography.
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