USA > Pennsylvania > A history of the Juniata Valley and its people, Volume III > Part 37
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He served as a private in the railroad riots of 1877; as major com- manded a battalion and acted as provost marshal during the riots at Homestead in 1892; commanded a battalion during the riots at Punxsu- tawney in June, 1894; he was in command of his regiment as colonel at Ashland in October, 1902, during the anthracite riots.
As a soldier and officer Colonel Elder early acquired a high and well-deserved reputation as an efficient disciplinarian, and a trained and reliable commander ; his personal and incessant care for his men under the rigid demands of the march, the camp and the endless drill, earned for him great and lasting popularity with his men. This high character for efficiency, discipline, courtesy, vigilance and impartiality as an officer remained with Colonel Elder all the years of his service and was never lost.
He has been a staunch Republican all his life, casting his first presi- dential ballot for Rutherford B. Hayes, and his latest in 1912 for Wil- liam H. Taft. He has been a delegate to Republican national conven- tions at Chicago. He declined at one time the nomination for presi-
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dent judge of the Twentieth Judicial District, and though deeply inter- ested in the welfare of the Republican party has never at any time wished to be known or classed as a politician.
He has been actively engaged in the practice of law for over thirty- six years, being associated in partnership with his father for over twenty years ; has practiced continuously in the lower and appellate courts of the state and the United States courts, except during those periods when called away from home into the military service of the United States and the state of Pennsylvania. Gifted with a ready and quick perception of the legal principles controlling a law case, possessed of a tenacious memory, a clear voice, rapid in enunciation and expressed without hesitation ; his rare common sense gave him a signal vantage ground in the trial of his intricate cases over his rivals at the bar ; his in- cisive address, simple and forcible diction and sound arguments were always sure of carrying the court and jury with him. As a lawyer it has always been his highest ambition to serve his clients with faithful and untiring devotion, and, when satisfied of the justice of a cause, he brought all the forces of his trained, logical, legal mind to the case in hand, and was ever cool, calm and amiable, never disconcerted or di- verted by any turn a case might take, and was most happy when deeply occupied in solving some abstruse law technicalities, or mastering and marshalling the field for the trial of some important case. As a coun- sellor he was always discreet, careful and safe; and brought to his clients' service a keen business judgment and a broad professional knowledge. He has always upheld the dignity and honor of the legal profession ; and his high standard of integrity and uprightness has earned for him an enviable reputation at the bar and the highest esteem of the courts, the people and his associates at the bar. His industry in the preparation of his cases is indefatigable, and he has well learned that old maxim of the skilled lawyer-"Nihil sine labore."
He is the resident counsel of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, the Standard Steel Company, Penn Central Light & Power Company, the Mifflin County National Bank, the Pennsylvania Glass Sand Com- pany, the James H. Mann Axe Company, the Thompson Woolen Fac- tories, the Susquehanna Silk Mills, and other corporations. He does a large probate and orphans' court business. He is vice-president and director of the Mifflin County National Bank, one of the strongest finan-
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cial institutions in the state; vice-president of the Lewistown Library Association ; was a prime mover in the erection and equipment of the splendid Lewistown Hospital, and is one of its trustees; is a member of the First Presbyterian Church of Lewistown, and is one of the most active and efficient trustees ; and is an active and influential member of the Lewistown Board of Trade.
On June 15, 1881, Colonel Elder was married to Miss Loa Belle McFarland, at Marshalltown, Iowa, a member of one of the oldest fam- ilies of New York and Pennsylvania. Mrs. Elder was the youngest daughter of Lewis and Jane McFarland, and was born at Union Springs, New York. She was a woman of wide culture and refinement ; was a public spirited woman, interested in everything that made for the uplift of the community, and was an earnest worker in all branches of church activity and in the home circles. She presided over the home of her husband with fidelity, dignity and grace, and contributed largely by the force of her character to the splendid education of her children and the advancement of the interests of her husband. She was a mem- ber of the Presbyterian church, and for many years a teacher in its Sabbath school. She was a charter member of the Outlook Club, and head of the executive committee of the Lewistown Library Association; she was for a long period president of the Woman's Home and Foreign Missionary Society of the Huntingdon Presbytery. Few women pos- sessed a wider knowledge of missionary work in the foreign and home fields, or showed more interest in missions. She was an active worker in the ranks of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and served as an officer of the local organization. Her practical ideas and active effort in all these lines of work, and her intelligent grasp of educational theories, made her a very useful member of society. Mrs. Elder died November 22, 191I, after a lingering and exhausting illness; her won- derful Christian fortitude under the constant suffering when confined to her home proved her unfaltering trust in her religious faith. She was laid to rest in the family lot in St. Mark's Cemetery.
Colonel and Mrs. Elder had three children: Margaretta Elder, edu- cated at Blair Hall and the noted Chicago Kindergarten School; for some years she was a successful teacher in the kindergarten department of the public schools of the city of Brooklyn, New York, only resigning her position when called at the death of her mother to preside over her
Eng &g E & Willens & Bre IF
George Robert Elder.
Lawas Historical Fub Co
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father's home. Jane Belle Elder, their second daughter, is a graduate of Blair Hall and Mt. Holyoke College. She is a fine German scholar, having taken a course in the University of Berlin, Germany. She is a teacher of German in the high schools of Paterson, New Jersey. George Wilson Elder, the youngest child of Colonel Elder, was educated at Blair Hall and at Pennsylvania State College. He is thoroughly versed in all branches of stock breeding and stock raising, and is now in the service of one of the largest and best equipped stock farms in the world, near Youngstown, Ohio. He is a young man of great charm of man- ner, and his devotion to his mother in her last illness proved the rare fiber of his lovable character. He is over six feet in height, and carries himself with ease and lightness, notwithstanding his weight exceeds two hundred pounds. He is a careful and accurate business man, with every promise of a successful career.
(V) George Robert Elder, second son of George Wilson Elder and Margaretta Shaw Elder, now a successful lawyer and extensive gold and silver mine owner of the city of Leadville, state of Colorado, was born at Lewistown, Pennsylvania, January 9, 1856. He was educated in the public schools and the Lewistown and Tuscarora academies; en- tered Princeton University in 1871, when fifteen years old, and gradu- ated with his class in 1875, at the age of nineteen. He was an indus- trious and diligent student, and kept a high standard of scholarship dur- ing his college course. At Princeton he was an enthusiastic devotee of gymnastic and athletic sports ; played for three years as a member of Princeton's champion football team; in that whole period the Princeton Tigers never suffered a defeat, Yale, Columbia, Lafayette and Rutgers scoring but one goal in all that series of games. To young Elder be- longed the unique honor of kicking the first goal from the field in the first football championship game played between those strenuous rivals, Yale and Princeton, at Hamilton Park, New Haven, Connecticut, No- vember 15, 1873. He was a skilful baseball player and active oarsman, being one of the founders of the Independent Baseball Club, long the champions of the Juniata Valley, and an organizer of the Juniata Boat Club.
He prepared for the profession of the law by three years of hard study in the office of and under the strict and able direction of his father, and was admitted to the bar of Pennsylvania at the August term,
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1878, of the Court of Common Pleas. He settled in Colorado in Sep- tember, 1878, being admitted to the bar of the Supreme Court of Colo- rado, December 7, 1878; established himself as a lawyer in the city of Leadville just at the commencement of that city's wonderful ore dis- coveries. His close industry, high moral character, profound legal knowledge and rare talents as an advocate and counselor, rapidly won for him an extensive and lucrative practice in the mining litigation aris- ing from the enormous silver and lead developments in the Leadville district. He was counsel in the Waterloo, Morning Star, Half Way House suits, the Little Ella, Little Lulu, Virginius, Curran Grand Prize and Emma mine cases; and in the criminal branch in the Dixon and Goodwin murder cases; as special prosecuting attorney in the Goodwin- Sullens case he secured one of the few convictions of murder in the first degree, obtained in the annals of the Fifth Judicial District of Colorado. The fact that the jury found the defendant guilty after the short delib- eration of five minutes was a splendid testimonial to the unrivaled mar- shalling of the evidence and the convincing eloquence of Mr. Elder and his associate counsel, Judge Allen T. Gunnell. The conviction of the principals in the famous ore stealing cases from the Aspen and Emma mines did much to drive from the district this pernicious form of theft. This period of the settlement of the land titles of rich gold and silver mines, and coal and iron entries, brought him a large land office practice before the land officers of the districts, the Commissioner of the General Land Office, and the Department of the Interior at Washing- ton. His civil business in the lower courts and the United States dis- trict and circuit courts entailed upon him a large appellate practice in the Colorado Supreme Court, the United States Supreme Court and the United States Circuit Court of Appeals ; in this field his talents as an accurate and concise brief maker and his vigorous and eloquent advo- cacy brought him well-merited success.
During this period Mr. Elder acquired large and valuable mining properties and became an owner in the stock of some of the bonanza mining corporations, out of which he reaped substantial dividend re- turns. For many years he was a large stockholder and managing direc- tor of the Dunkin mine, one of the Fryer Hill bonanzas. He also held large stock interests in the Adams Mining Company, one of the greatest producers of silver, lead and zinc of the Carbonate Hill section; this
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mine is still producing over a half million dollars per annum of ores after twenty-five years' operation. Notwithstanding the discouragement of the final demonetization of silver, Mr. Elder has continued to invest heavily in precious metal mining in Colorado, with the firm and unwav- ering belief that the state of Colorado contains inexhaustible mineral treasures, and that some day the world will have to restore silver to a world-wide use as coined money.
In October, 1886, he was married to Miss Ida Dull, only daughter of Daniel Matieu Dull and Nannie J. Bratton Dull, of Lewistown, Penn- sylvania, a young lady of great personal beauty, handsome presence and of wide popularity. She was a graduate of Ogontz College, at Philadelphia, receiving all the advantages of that excellent institution. She is closely related to many of the prominent and distinguished fami- lies of the Keystone State : the Dulls. Brattons, Hollidays, Lowrys, Mc- Cormicks, Bells. Ross, Hamiltons, Criswells. Gross, Boyds, Stewarts, McCoys, etc.
Her father, Daniel M. Dull, a veteran of the Mexican war, accom- panied General Scott's army in its victorious entry of the City of Mex- ico, and was honorably mentioned for bravery and courage at the battle of Chapultepec in the official return of General John W. Geary. He was a large landowner, proprietor of the Dull Sand mines near McVey- town, Pennsylvania, producing the highest grade of silica sand in the world; was an able and successful contractor, having extensive con- tracts on the Pennsylvania railroad and canal. the Gallitzin tunnel in the Alleghanies, the Hoosac tunnel in Massachusetts, the bridges at Pitts- burgh over the Ohio and Allegheny rivers, and the immense steamboat locks and dams upon the Monongahela river in West Virginia, con- structed by the United States.
Mrs. Elder is a woman of splendid literary, artistic and musical talents, her papers read before the Woman's Club of Denver having been classed as wonderful products of a woman's pen; her addresses upon art, music and travel before the Woman's Club of Leadville were always enthusiastically appreciated. She is a woman of a charming per- sonality and a splendid conversationalist ; she has been a diligent French scholar and student, speaking the French language with fluent and un- usual command of the difficult idioms of Paris and the provinces. This talent has been the result of studious work, and was greatly aided and
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promoted by her numerous trips to Europe and long sojourns in the cities of the continent. Mrs. Elder is passionately fond of music; for many years she was leading soprano in the Presbyterian Church at Lewistown, her voice being favorably compared in its thorough train- ing and its compass and beauty of tone to that of some of the best modern singers. She sang at some of the noted concerts of the Apollo Club of Leadville, a famous musical organization of that city, her per- formances being received with great favor. She is a skilled organist and pianist, and finds time in the midst of the exacting calls of her fine home and its social activities to keep fully abreast in her practice with the best modern piano musical scores.
She is a woman of wide and discriminating scholarship; has main- tained a broad and catholic taste in her choice of books ; is a thorough stu- dent in ancient and modern history, and vies with her student husband in his close study of the developments of modern constitutional and govern- mental law. She has studied with thorough discrimination the works of the great masters of the arts of painting, sculpture and architecture at first hand in the magnificent galleries of Rome, Florence, Milan, Dres- den, Munich, Brussels, Vienna, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Paris, London, and other centers of art; the cathedrals, palaces, churches, abbeys, cas- tles, and the remains of ancient architecture in Europe have always had a great fascination and charm for her, and her mind has widened and improved in such interesting studies. In her home she has many well-selected copies of some of the great paintings of the older schools of modern art, such as Guido Reni and Del Sarto and other noted artists. The happiness and comfort of a well-ordered home is the high- est ambition of Mrs. Elder's life, and she cheerfully denies herself many of the wider social activities to compass this ambition.
Her ancestry embraces all five of the virile Anglo-Saxon lines which have combined to render the people of the United States the most cos- mopolitan the world has yet seen-the English, German, Huguenot French, Scotch and Scotch-Irish; and all of her ancestors were active patriots in the revolution. At its original organization Mrs. Elder joined the Daughters of the American Revolution; her certificate, No. 622, was signed by Mrs. Benjamin Harrison, president general. She preserves with great pride the commission of her great-grandfather, Captain William Bratton, signed by John Hancock. Captain Bratton
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was one of the few survivors of the Paoli Massacre, most of his regi- ment, the Seventh of the Pennsylvania Line, being murdered in that night attack. Ile was wounded at the battle of Germantown, and was present at the battles of Trenton and Princeton. His wife, Hester Hamilton, of Newton Hamilton, Pennsylvania, was a survivor of one of the dreadful Indian massacres of the border, having a miraculous escape from captivity in the Allegheny mountains while being taken to Canada by the Indians.
Her great-great-grandfather, Casper Dull, was captain of the Phila- delphia Light Dragons in the revolution, a famous cavalry organization of that period, which still ( 1913) continues its existence as the noted City Troop of the National Guard. Captain Casper Dull was the son of Casper Dull, a native of the city of Mainz on the Rhine, in the Grand Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt, Germany, who, with his brothers, Christian and Sebastian Dull, sailed from Rotterdam, August 27, 1839. in the ship "Samuel," Hugh Percy, captain, and landed at Philadelphia. Captain Casper Dull married Hannah Matieu, a lady of French Hugue- not descent, born in Philadelphia ; they are buried in the old Presbyter- ian cemetery at McVeytown, Pennsylvania.
Mrs. Elder is a lineal descendant in the fourth generation of Adam Holliday and Sarah Campbell Holliday. Adam Holliday was born in Scotland, and after a short emigration to the north of Ireland he came to Pennsylvania in 1750, settling first in the neighborhood of Manor. Lancaster county. Adam Holliday was a noted frontiersman, was the founder of the city of Hollidaysburg, Blair county, Pennsylvania. Be- ing a man of considerable means, he purchased large tracts of land, his first purchase being one thousand acres, comprising all the lands upon which Hollidaysburg now stands. AAdam Holliday was a man of great activity and courage ; during the Indian wars and the war of the revolu- tion out of his own means he built forts and equipped troops with arms and ammunition for the defense of the frontier. He became a man of large wealth and prominence. Adam Holliday lived to a good old age, and died at Hollidaysburg in 1801. He was ancestor of the large family of Hollidays throughout the United States. Mrs. Sarah Campbell Hol- liday, born in Scotland, was a full cousin of the Duke of Argyle, who visited the Holliday family at Hollidaysburg, and afterward sent her
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from Scotland a gold snuff box, inscribed, "To my American cousin, Sarah Campbell," decorated with the Argyle and Clan Campbell arms.
Mr. Elder's great-grandfather, Judge William Shaw, was a member of the committee of safety of Northumberland county in the revolu- tion, and an officer in a Northumberland county company. His great- great-grandfather, Captain John Little, was captain of a company of foot in the French and Indian war; his parchment commission, signed by John Penn, governor of the province of Pennsylvania, is in Mr. Elder's possession. Another great-grandfather, Lieutenant James Scott, was an officer in one of the Donegal companies of Colonel Alexander Lowry's regiment of Lancaster county troops.
In the Elder line every ancestor was in the ranks as a patriot in the revolution. In the muster roll of the Third company of the First Bat- talion of Cumberland county, July 31, 1777, the name of Abraham Elder, his great-grandfather, appears as a private, as well as the names of David Elder and Samuel Elder, his brothers. Colonel Robert Elder's regiment of Lancaster county contained the names of eight Elders. All of the sons of John Elder, the fighting parson of the revolution, served in Lancaster county regiments.
Mr. and Mrs. Elder have one son, Robert Dull Elder, born June 25, 1889; educated in the high school at Leadville; Lawrenceville School, New Jersey, 1907; Princeton, A. B. 1911; Columbia M. A., 1913; Co- lumbia Law Department, LL.B., 1914. Robert maintained a high type of scholarship at Princeton and Columbia, especially in English litera- ture and ancient and modern languages. He recently published a fasci- nating and entertaining novel of American life, called "The Sojourner," Harper & Brothers, April, 1913. This novel has been denominated by competent critics as one of the best American novels of the year 1913.
His son has inherited much of his father's enthusiasm in athletics; he was a prize winner in many wrestling matches at Princeton and at Columbia. For several years he has won the first prizes at the Cale- donian games at Leadville in throwing the sixteen and twelve-pound hammers. At the completion of his law course at Columbia University he intends to join his father in the practice of the law. The success of his novel, "The Sojourner," will doubtless encourage him to further efforts in the literary line.
For many years George R. Elder was counsel of Lake county in its
Robert Dall Eller
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large and extensive bond litigation, and his industry, ability and thor- ough knowledge of the constitutional and legislative limitations gov- erning bond issues and the court decisions made upon them, was fully rewarded by a long series of judgments in favor of Lake county in the lower and higher courts. In company with Governor Charles S. Thomas, now United States senator from Colorado, in December, 1898, he argued the case of Henry H. Dudley vs. Lake county, in the Su- preme Court of the United States, involving $150,000 of bonds and coupons directly, and indirectly over $1.250,000 bonds, coupons and in- terest of a second issue. The unanimous decision of that court by Justice Harlan, delivered in February, 1899, sustained all of the con- tentions of Mr. Elder and his associate counsel.
In politics he has always been an optimist, believing that the won- derful educational advantages of the American electorate would safely protect and secure the inestimable privileges gained from the lessons of European history and the American revolution. This optimism is based on the staunch belief that the blending and welding into a cosmopolitan nationality in the United States of all these Anglo-Saxon and Latin races-the most moral races of men the world has yet seen ; blest with the most equitable laws; the fairest domestic and civil virtues; and the least violent passions-cannot and will not impair with inexorable fa- tality the life of this magnificent nation.
For fully fifteen years he voted for and labored to support and maintain the high protective war tariffs, and the stationary currency system, based upon the bonds of the United States, inaugurated and per- petuated by the Republican party. When this plutocratic system created within the great prosperous American nation and its popular govern- ment an intrenched fortress of special privilege, monopolies and trusts, with its subsidized array of purchasable officials, judges, congressmen and senators, he left the Republican party and advocated the doctrines of the People's party, the first party to declare against these cancers in the body politic. He gave his best effort in Colorado to ballot reform, writing the first demand for the Australian Ballot Act as chairman of the platform committee of the first party asking such reform in Colo- rado. He was an insistent advocate of the first Corrupt Practice Act, and the bill as passed in 1891 is substantially as first prepared by him. He strenuously supported Woman Suffrage, and the success of its adop-
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tion in the state of Colorado in 1893 was in no small degree due to his incessant activity and advocacy. He has been a firm advocate of the income tax, postal savings banks, public ownership of public utilities, such as water, light, telegraph and telephone, where the nature of the utility is necessarily a monopoly. He believes profoundly in the rigid su- pervision of railroad corporations with monopoly privileges, under wise, comprehensive national control, and in case of failure of such laws, to gradually replace existing railroads by government ownership, provided this end is attained without the taking over of the great issues of watered bonds and stock created recklessly by the private railroad corporations. He has advocated for many years the Panama Canal as the first step to destroy the tyranny of the transcontinental railroads, and to bring back American commerce on the sea to American owned ships. To these ends it is his firm belief that the American Congress should grant liberal subsidies to American ships, so long as the British Empire continues its enormous subsidies to English ships. It is his belief that the expendi- ture of a small percentage of the gigantic and staggering $400,000,000 annually expended by the United States government and the state gov- ernments on the military and naval establishments of the nation in sub- sidies to American owned ships, would place such a final embargo upon international wars as to require no peace congresses or great standing armies. He firmly believes that the national circulating medium for this wonderful, progressive nation should never be circumscribed by and based upon its existing bonded debt and the limited annual produc- tion of the precious metals. The National Banking System, once a powerful factor in American finance for good, no longer meets the in- sistent demands of commerce and trade for a stable, elastic and abun- dant circulating medium. From these propositions it was inevitable that he should become a supporter of the Democratic party as soon as repeated defeats brought it to an unqualified support of these funda- mental demands. He gave his support in the campaign of 1912 to the nomination and election of Woodrow Wilson.
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