USA > Pennsylvania > Luzerne County > Families of the Wyoming Valley: biographical, genealogical and historical. Sketches of the bench and bar of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, vol. I > Part 1
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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45
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Gc 974.801 L97k v.1 1555754
M. L
GENEALOGY COLLECTION
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ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 02219 8714
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Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2015
https://archive.org/details/familiesofwyomin01kulp_0
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F
FAMILIES
C
OF THE
WYOMING VALLEY, Pennsylva
BIOGRAPHICAL, GENEALOGICAL, AND HISTORICAL.
SKETCHES OF THE BENCH . AND BAR
OF LUZERNE COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA.
BY
GEO. B. KULP,
HISTORIOGRAPHER OF THE WYOMING HISTORICAL AND GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY.
" This shall be written for the generation to come."-Psalms cii: 18.
" Remember the days of old ; consider the years of many generations; ask thy father and he will shew thee, thy elders, and they will tell thee."-Deut. xxxii : 7.
" The man who feels no sentiment of veneration for the memory of his forefathers, who has no natural regard for his ancestors or his kindred, is himself unworthy of kindred regard or remembrance " -Daniel Webster.
IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. I.
WILKES-BARRE, PENNSYLVANIA. 1
1885.
1555754
si
Copyright 1885 by GEORGE B. KULP
E. B. YORDY, PRINTER, Wilkes-Barre, Pa
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TO THE FRIEND,
BOTH OF MY YOUTH AND OF MY MATURER MANHOOD, TO THE
PATRIOTIC CITIZEN AND CHRISTIAN GENTLEMAN,
HON. ANTHONY MADISON HIGGINS, OF SAINT GEORGE'S, DELAWARE,
THIS BOOK IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED.
PREFACE.
If I unwittingly *
* *
Have aught committed that is hardly borne To any in this presence, I desire To reconcile me to his friendly peace : 'Tis death to me to be at enmity ; I hate it, and desire all good men's love. -Richard III.
These words, employed by the craft of Gloster to close the eye of suspicion against his unholy ambitions and cruelty, are here bestowed to speak a serious truth. It has been the chief aim in the preparation of this work to present all the principal facts in the lives and ancestry of the members of the legal profession in Luzerne county ; to present them reliably, and, in such comment as may be esteemed to verge upon the line of criticism, to offer only a generously impartial judgment. The task has involved much labor and been attended by all the many difficulties that of necessity accompany historical research in any previously unexplored field; but it has been patiently and honestly performed, and the results, as recorded in the printed pages which follow, are sincerely believed to be substantially accurate and fair. If error there be, either in date, circumstance, or expression of opinion, it is error undesignedly perpetrated, and Gloster's speech is borrowed to make appropriate apology in advance. A com- plete biography of the members of a bar as numerous and admit- tedly conspicuous for their professional talent as that of Luzerne county, if made to include a genealogy of the families represented -and no biography is complete without that (see Matthew I., and Luke III.)-is necessarily in great part a history of the county it- self. It is, at least, a history of the greater number of its leading families and leading men, and contains more or less detailed refer- ence to all the principal events in the county history. These par- ticular biographies have, in the research they have made requisite, developed not a few facts hitherto unrecorded in book form, which must needs be of interest and importance to the general student of local history. Nearly all the old New Englanders, particu-
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PREFACE.
larly those from Connecticut, and all the old Pennsylvania families from the lower counties who together made up the earlier set- tlers of the Wyoming Valley, and endured the hardships, fatigues, and dangers of this then practically unbroken wilderness, fig- ure in these pages as the progenitors of many of the men who have been, or now are, practitioners at the Luzerne county bar. Most of them were men who would have made their mark any- where, or under any circumstances, in sufficient proof of which we have the fact that they did that very thing amid discourage- ments that were not more than paralleled in any part of the country, or at any period in our colonial history. The first set- tlement of the valley was in 1762, but a year later these original pioneers were driven away-some being ruthlessly massacred- and it was not until 1769 that a second attempt at settlement was made. These sixty-niners found three foes to conquer ; the Pen- namites or claimants under the Pennsylvania title, the treacher- ous and predatory Indians, and the then unbroken forests. Only men of stout hearts and vigorous understanding could hope to make successful combat against such a formidable trio of obsta- cles to civilized settlement at one and the same time. The Con- necticut settlers brought with them both these essential adjuncts to the needed victory. They were no mere experimenters or excursionists. They had come to stay, and they began immedi- ately to lay the foundations of a permanent Christian and en- lightened community by setting aside parts of their great land purchase for gospel, and parts for educational purposes, and still other parts for public commons or parks forever. When, only nine years later, the ever memorable massacre came, they had established several villages, containing, as near as can be esti- mated, eight hundred houses, the homes of a hardy, thrifty, and God-fearing people. It is but natural that among the descend- ants of these men are numbered many of the most brilliant, per- severing, and successful pulpit workers the state has produced. And when, in a day and a night, the savages, spurred to fiendish- ness by the machinations of the British, had sent scores of them to bloody graves and given nearly all their beautiful homes to the torch, they had not vanquished the indomitable spirit of the survivors, who returned just as soon as it was safe, avenged them-
:
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PREFACE.
selves upon their cruel persecutors, rebuilt their razed domiciles, re-tilled their fields, re-opened their schools and churches, and made a new, and even an improved, Wyoming, the seat of lasting peace and continuous plenty. . In the lives of these men, and the troubles and trials that surrounded them, was an ever progressing development of those traits of individuality and moral energies that are the corner-stones of our liberties and prosperity, and the most valuable and valued heritage of their descendants. Some there are in our galaxy, whose ancestry lived and died in other lands, or came here at a later date. Tracing their histories has carried us into all parts of the world, and resur- rected many incidents of unusual moment in its history, all which will, we think, be found both generally interesting and instruct- ive. In every instance, with these and with the others, we have gone to the most reliable authorities for our facts, seeking al- ways precision and completeness as essential in a work of this kind, if it is to have any real and permanent value. This, so far as known, is the first history of the bench and bar of a county ever published. The biographies of the judges and leading law- yers of the United States and of single states have been collated and printed in book form, but the lesser divisions, and the idea of including all, whether distinguished or otherwise, or in the beginning or at the maturity of their professional careers, has, up to this time, been disregarded. Objection has been made that the biographer should deal only with those whose life-work has been completed and who have been gathered to their fathers. While that objection is very ingeniously and plausibly supported, we have not felt it to be insuperable, though, on the other hand, we have convinced ourselves that no family or sectional history can be esteemed complete that ignores the living. And the liv- ing of to-day are the dead of to-morrow. These biographies were all first published, in the order of the professional seniority of their subjects, in the weekly issues of the Luserne Legal Reg- ister, the first bearing date February 18, 1881 ; and compara. tively recent as that date is, no fewer than ten have since been called to the other world, as follows: Stephen S. Winchester, Hendrick B. Wright, James A. Gordon, Charles Pike, Ebenezer W. Sturdevant, Calvin Wadhams, William R. Kingman, Aaron
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PREFACE.
J. Dietrick, Daniel S. Bennet, and Harrison Wright. For valu- able assistance rendered in connection with our labors we are gratefully indebted to Rev. Horace Edwin Hayden, Sheldon Reynolds, Oscar J. Harvey, Hon. Steuben Jenkins, Irving A. Stearns, and especially to C. Ben Johnson. With this brief statement of the certainly modest design of the work and those matters incident to its compilation in which it has been thought the reader might feel an interest; with the advance caution to critics that it offers no pretensions to literary excellence, and with the hope that the imperfections, from which we cannot reasonably expect it has wholly escaped, will be generously overlooked, and that it may serve a useful local if not general purpose, we commend it to that great literary ocean, where, if it founders, it will at least leave us the consoling reflection that it abides in its distress in the company of many wrecks of craft far more ambitiously freighted and far more ceremoniously launched. With the second volume we propose to have a com- plete and perfect index to the entire work, which will embrace every name mentioned in the book, besides a complete historical index to the same.
WILKES-BARRE, PA., June, 1885.
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.
FAMILIES . .
OF THE
WYOMING
VALLEY.
JAMES AUGUSTUS GORDON.
James Augustus Gordon, the oldest resident member of the bar in Luzerne county, was born October 6th, 1797, in the town of Painted Post (now the city of Corning), Steuben county, New York. His mother was the daughter of Cornelius Atherton, a grandson of Gen. Humphry Atherton, of Boston. Mr. Gordon early sufferred the loss of his father, James A. Gordon, Sr., and after his death his mother removed to Wyoming, where her rela- tives then resided. She was universally known as the " Widow Gordon," and from 1804 to the time of her death, in 1846, she resided in Wilkes-Barre. Mr. Gordon comes of some of the best blood of Scotland. Of the Ayrshire Gordons, George Gordon, the grandfather of our subject, was born near Alloway Kirk, on the banks of the Doon, and came to New Jersey in 1767, settling at Elizabethtown, where the father of James A. Gordon was born in 1769, as also his brother John, who was the grandfather of John B. Gordon, late United States Senator from Georgia. Mr. Gordon, after having served an apprenticeship to the trade of carpentering, commenced the study of the law with Hon. George Denison in September, 1820. He was admitted to the bar on the 7th of August, 1822, on the certificate of Thomas Dyer, Roswell Wells, and Garrick Mallery, Esquires, the examining committee. The education of Mr. Gordon was quite limited, he never having attended any school after he was thirteen years of age. He was an amateur type-setter in boyhood days, and spent his leisure time in the printing office of Hon. Charles Miner, where he first imbibed his taste for journalism. In his early years he was as-
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HENDRICK BRADLEY WRIGHT.
sistant editor and contributor to the Detroit Free Press and other newspapers. In 1834 he established the Mountaincer at Conyng- ham, in this county. This paper was the avowed and energetic enemy of the monopoly of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company. In it first appeared M -. Gordon's best efforts against the monopolizing tendency of that age. Although Mr. Gordon was a good student, and well versed in the law, he had little taste for the practice, but was fond of his mechanical skill. He has spent the greatest part of his life as a constructing engineer, and the specimens of his handiwork can be seen at Mauch Chunk, Blossburg, Pittston, and other places. In 1871 he located- him- self at Plymouth, where he now resides. His time has been chiefly devoted to journalizing. Among his published produc- tions are "Old Memories of Wyoming and its Early Settlers." Mr. Gordon married September 22d, 1822, Hannah Wall, daugh- ter of Coggshall Wall, of North Norwich, Chenango county, N. Y., a great-granddaughter of ex-Governor Coggshall, of Rhode Island, and cousin of Hon. Garrett D. Wall, ex-governor of New Jersey. Mr and Mrs. Gordon have had twelve children. Captain Harry M. Gordon and an invalid daughter are the only survivors.
HENDRICK BRADLEY WRIGHT.
Hendrick Bradley Wright was born at Plymouth, Luzerne county Pennsylvania, on the 24th day of April, 1808. His father, Joseph Wright, was of that family of Wrights whose ancestors came to America from England in 1681 with William Penn's col- ony of Quaker emigrants. John Wright, one of the number, in a short time after the landing, commenced a residence in the eastern part of Burlington county, New Jersey, and was the first settler of Wrightstown, being the founder, in fact, of the village of that name. He held a commission of Justice of the Peace and Captain of the militia under the royal seal of Charles II., and at the same time was an ardent member and supporter of the Society of Friends. A diary kept by this pioneer is still in the possession of the family. The mother of Hendrick B. Wright, whose maiden
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HENDRICK BRADLEY WRIGHT.
name was Hendrick, was descended from an earlier Puritan set- tler of Massachusetts. His father removed from Wrightstown to Plymouth (or the Susquehanna country, as many then called it) in the year 1795, and soon became one of its most prominent and substantial inhabitants. Ambitious for the welfare of his son, he secured for him the best educational advantages which the locality afforded, and in due course of time sent him to Dick- inson College, where he pursued the usual classical and mathe- matical studies. Upon leaving college he began the study of the law in the office of the late Judge Conyngham, of Wilkes-Barre. Under the wise counsels and kind encouragement of that able jurist and truly admirable man, he made rapid progress, and was admitted to the bar of Luzerne county on November 8th, 1831, on the certificate of James McClintock, O. Collins, and George Denison. During the ten years which followed, Mr. Wright de- voted himself assiduously to his profession. The bar of Luzerne county at that period contained many of the most learned and eminent counselors of Pennsylvania. Among these Mr. Wright soon took a high position, and as an advocate achieved a marked pre-eminence. Above the middle height, of large frame, of erect and commanding figure, with great power, and a flexibility of voice, and a countenance full of life and expression, he was an orator who arrested and continued to compel attention. It was not without reason that his clients believed and said that no jury could resist him. Armed at all points with evidence, drawn from every available source, and brought to bear upon the minds of the triers in such order and with such strength as to render the cause of an opponent almost hopeless from the outset, he followed these attacks with arguments of such earnestness and energy as rarely failed to complete the rout, and secure an easy victory. In truth, it may be said that in a just cause he never knew defeat. Such success could not otherwise than win for him an extensive reputation, and a laborious as well as a lucrative practice.
In the year 1841, partly to satisfy his numerous friends, and partly as a respite from professional toil, he accepted a nomina- tion to the House of Representatives of Pennsylvania, and was elected. He at once became prominent as a committeeman and debater, and was soon acknowledged as one of the leaders of the
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HENDRICK BRADLEY WRIGHT.
House. In 1842 he was again elected, and appointed chairman of the Committee on Canals and Internal Improvements, a subject that had always deeply interested him, and to which he now devoted much attention. He also took a position on the Judi- ciary Committee under his friend, Judge Elwell, of the Columbia Judicial District, for the express purpose of procuring a repeal of the law providing for the imprisonment of poor debtors. In this matter his efforts were untiring, and he had at last the satisfaction of seeing that barbarous law blotted out of the statute book of his native State. He also strenuously endeavored to procure the abolition from the prison discipline of Pennsylvania of the system of solitary confinement, a method of punishment which always appeared to him as equally needless and inhuman. But in this effort he was unsuccessful. In 1843 the nomination of State Senator was offered to him, but preferring the popular branch of the Assembly, he declined the honor, and was again elected to the House. Upon the opening of the session he was chosen Speaker, a position which he ably filled, and where he acquired a facility in parliamentary rules and usages which proved of singular advantage to him in the years that followed.
In May, 1844, the Democratic National Convention met in Baltimore to nominate a candidate for the Presidency. It was a time of great excitement growing out of the Texas annexation question. The convention was almost equally divided in senti- ment upon the subject, and great fears of serious dissensions were entertained. The friends of annexation met in council and after a long discussion determined that every other consideration must yield to the necessity of appointing to the chairmanship of the convention some man skilled in parliamentary rules, and of sufficient tact and courage to secure their enforcement in every possible emergency. Mr. Wright, then a delegate at large from Pennsylvania, was at once recognized as the man for the occasion and, having been first unanimously elected temporary chairman, discharged his difficult and responsible task with such efficiency during the organization of the convention that he was unani- mously chosen its permanent presiding officer. At this conven- tion, whose session lasted nearly a week, and over whose stormy discussion its able chairman held an unrelaxing and impartial
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HENDRICK BRADLEY WRIGHT.
rein, James K. Polk, a Texas annexation candidate, was finally nominated. At the close of the convention Mr. Wright bade farewell to the assembled delegates in these words :
"Our labor is terminated : our work is done. In a few hours we leave this arena of the last four days' action, but my voice falters under the thought that we part forever. This body, composed of the most distinguished men of the country, was assembled to discharge as solemn and sacred a trust as that committed to the men who met in the hall of the Continental Congress when the great charter of American liberty was born. If the eastern conqueror wept over the millions of human beings passing in review before him-for that in a short time not one of them should be left-how much more reason have I to weep at the thought that this concentrated monument of mind before me must pass away in the change of all things. But it cannot be. It will be fresh on the page of history when the pyramids of the Nile shall have crumbled, stone by stone, to atoms. The man may die, but the fruits of his mind are the growth of eternity."
From 1844 to 1852 Mr. Wright was again engrossed in the duties of his profession. In the latter year he was elected to Congress and served a term with marked ability. He was renominated in 1854, but was defeated by Hon. Henry M. Fuller (father of Henry A. Fuller, Esq., of the Luzerne county bar), who represented the American or " Know Nothing " element, of whose narrow and exclusive policy Mr. Wright had always been a most uncompromising foe. Colonel Wright (by which title he was gen- erally known), having been commissioned by Gov. Wolf, in 1834, District Attorney, concluded to retire from public life and devote the remainder of his days to the law. But upon the breaking out of the rebellion, in 1861, he was again called from his retire- ment. The nomination to Congress was tendered him by both political parties. He accepted, and was, of course, elected ; and, amid the perplexities and dangers which surrounded the Federal Congress during the next two years, he was distinguished as a consistent and untiring advocate of an undivided Union. Although a life-long Democrat, and as such wedded by the strongest political ties to the doctrine of state sovereignty, yet in him the citizen ever rose above the politician, and in the hour of national peril he was contented to let political opinions slumber until the great and pressing work of national salvation was
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HENDRICK BRADLEY WRIGHT.
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accomplished. Thus, while he advocated no measure of subju- gation, and regarded interference with domestic institutions for their own sake as unadvisable, he constantly supported the government by his vote and his voice in its every attempt to overthrow the internal enemy. At this time there was practically three great parties in the nation, the Democratic, Republican, and War Democrats, of which latter party Mr. Wright was a member. In a speech delivered January 14th, 1863, not long after he had followed Captain Joseph Wright, of the Luzerne county bar, his eldest son, to a soldier's grave, he thus replied to the resolutions offered by Mr. Vallandigham, a Democrat :
" Sir, there is no patriotic man who does not desire peace ; not peace, however, upon dishonorable terms ; not peace that would destroy our great government ; not peace that would place us in an humble attitude at the feet of traitors, but that peace which will make peace live; peace that shall maintain and perpetuate the eternal principles of union based upon equality handed down to us by our fathers and sealed with their blood; the peace of Washington and Lafayette, whose images decorate the walls of this house; a peace that shall not defame and belie the memory of these illustrious inen is the one I would see established in this land. * * * Our army went to the field to suppress rebellion. Its numbers have reached over eight hundred thou- sand men, larger than any ariny of ancient or modern times. It is still in the field, and its destiny is to preserve entire this Union and protect the flag, and it has the courage and power to do it. * I bring my remarks to a close. Where I stood when the rebellion began I stand to-day-on the same platform. My opinions have undergone no change. I denounced rebellion at the threshold ; I denounce it now. I have no terms to make with the enemy of my country which will destroy the Union ; I am satisfied that no other can be obtained. Time will determine whether my position is right or not, and I calmly abide it. The war, sir, has cost me its trials and tribulations, and I can truly close my remarks with a quotation from an ancient philosopher, uttered over the dead body of his son, slain in battle :
' I should have blushed if Cato's house had stood Secure and flourished in a civil war.'"
On the same day Mr. Vallandigham spoke to the resolutions of Mr. Wright and defined his position on the war question. In this speech he thanked God that not the smell of so much as one
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HENDRICK BRADLEY WRIGHT.
drop of blood was upon his garments, and characterized as a monstrous delusion the attempt to whip back the Southern brethren into love and fellowship at the point of the bayonet, and denounced in excedingly bitter terms the usurpations and infractions of public liberty and private right by the administra- tion. Mr. Vallandigham closed his third term in Congress on the 4th of March, 1863. He returned to Ohio and was arrested by the military authorities for a speech delivered at Mount Vernon, Ohio. On the next day he published the following address to his political friends :
MILITARY PRISON, Cincinnati, (Ohio), May 5th, 1863.
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To the Democracy of Ohio :- I am here in a military bastile for no other offense than my political opinions, and the defense of them, and of the rights of the people, and of your constitutional liberties. Speeches made in the hearing of thousands of you in denunciation of the usurpations of power, infractions of the constitution and laws, and of military despotism were the sole cause of my arrest and imprisonment. I am a Democrat-for the constitution, for law, for the Union, for liberty-this is my only "crime." For no disobedience to the constitution ; for no viola- tion of law ; for no word, sign or gesture of sympathy with the men of the South, who are for disunion and Southern independ- ence, but in obedience to their demand as well as the demand of Northern abolition disunionists and traitors, I am here in bonds to-day ; but " Time, at last, sets all things even !" Meanwhile, Democrats of Ohio, of the Northwest, of the United States, be firm, be true to your principles, to the constitution, to the Union, and all will yet be well. As for myself, I adhere to every princi- ple, and will make good, through imprisonment and life itself, every pledge and declaration which I have ever made, uttered, or maintained from the beginning. To you, to the whole people, to Time, I again appeal. Stand firm! Falter not an instant !
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