USA > South Dakota > Who's who in South Dakota, Vol. I > Part 11
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"One secret of his wide influence lay in his ability to draw out the most and the best from each pupil, teacher or citizen. with whom he was actively associated in work.
"His high ideals, his definite plans, his resolute purpose, his readiness to recognize merit, his eagerness to encourage those who were seeking the best, were unfailing sources of inspiration.
"Soon after assuming the management of the Hannibal public
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schools, Mr. H. K. Warren was married to Miss Lily Hamilton of Michigan, a woman of unusual intellectual and spiritual power, an uplifting force in domestic, social and church circles.
"Six years did Mr. Warren, this man of powerful physique, remarkable energy, indefatigable power of endurance, masterful mind, labor in laying the solid foundation of the school system which exists today in Hannibal-a lasting monument to his rare executive power and forceful intellect. Truly he was a 'tower of strength' in the midst of the little city."
Another party, written to at Salt Lake, Utah, had this to say of him:
"Dear Sir: Answering yours of November 23, and December 13, asking about work of Prof. H. K. Warren, for the year he spent here as president of Salt Lake College, would say the word 'college' in connection with our school was for the future. We only had the preparatory department. It has been called Salt Lake Academy. But we wanted a college and changed the name and secured the services of Prof. Warren, and during his stay with us the school made decided progress towards being worthy of the name. His work with us was eminently successful and satisfactory, but the constituency out of which to build a college was small and scattered, and the growth was bound to be slow. There was much competition in the field, of other colleges trying to start here. Therefore, while it was a grievous disappointment to us when at the end of a year he announced that he had decided that he thought it his duty to leave us and go to Yankton. we could not blame him. We remember his work here with pleasure, but also with regret that he did not stay with us. Whe have not yet been able to find anyone to fill the place, efficiently, that was left vacant when he went away."
The report on his work in Nebraska as president of Gates College, at Neligh, was equally favorable. One of his admiring friends, among many other beautiful things, says: "I feel incap- able of doing justice to his splendid work."
But, enough of this. We are more interested in what he is doing and has done in South Dakota.
First of all let it be said that President Warren is a born organizer. He has demonstrated this in every field of work in which he has been engaged-particularly so at Yankton. Again, he is a good "money getter," and this element dare never be lacking any man selected for the head of a denominational school. A few years since we picked up a Sioux City Journal on the train and noted where this man Warren had just pulled the leg of Dr. Pearson of Chicago for $34,000; and at another time we saw
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where he had hit Andrew Carnegie for an even half as much; and we have a faint recollection that on another occasion he tapped a wealthy New Yorker for $100,000. The big "gifts" mean a lot to any school. It costs a large per cent of the small contributions to collect them.
Since Warren was chosen president of Yankton College in 1892, the presidents of all other colleges in the state have been changed from two to four times apiece. (We are now writng about colleges, not normal schools.) He is a "stayer" since he got into the proper field.
In addition to his presidential work, he has been for years one of the institute conductors and instructors of the state. Each year he also delivers a large number of commencement addresses throughout the state. We recall having heard one of these ad- dresses in 1904, and it had in it more "meat" than any similar address to which we have ever listened.
President Warren has large plans for the future of the school, over which he has so ably presided for the past fifteen years. Just now he is in the midst of a campaign to raise an additional endowment fund of $250,000. He got half of the amount pledged from "big fish" before he attacked the "small fries." Of course he will win -he never knew defeat and he never will. He isn't built that way.
HOME LIFE
No matter what position a man may occupy, if his home life is not pleasant, he is a failure. Any man is foolish to close his eyes and select a companion who is going to handicap him for life. The English girls who were brought to America away back in the seventeenth century and bartered as wives to the James- town colonists for so many pounds, each, of tobacco, made better helpmeets than lots of girls selected nowadays after a brief courtship.
Warren went slow on this vital proposition. When Don Cupid got to arousing the palpitations of his heart he centered his affection on an accomplished lady who had been severely tested, Miss Lillian Elizabeth Hamilton, a graduate of Mt. Hol- yoke seminary, and at the time of her marriage perceptress of the Sturgis, Michigan, schools.
President and Mrs. Warren are the happy parents of three, strong, promising children. The eldest son, Howard Hamilton Warren, graduated from Yankton College in 1907, and the same year he won the interstate oratorical contest. He is now a senior
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in the Harvard law school. President Warren is building great hopes on this boy's future, and no doubt they will be realized, if not surpassed. The two younger children, Robert and Ruth, are now academy students.
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E. L. ABEL
LITTLE, BUT OH! MY
"PREMIERES FUNERAILIES" (the first funeral) is the inscription on a touching piece of triple statuary in the north end of the Art Institute in Chicago. This same embodies Adam and Eve carrying in front of them the nude form of their son, Abel, killed by his brother, Cain, ready to deposit it in an open tomb and it commemorates the first murder.
Abel is represented in the Bible as an ideal son. Those who believe in the re-incarnation of the soul may find some consola- tion in the presumption that Abel's ideal soul is now re-incar- nated in another Abel-the Honorable E. L., of Huron.
Here is a little fellow -"little, but Oh! my," "abel" to hold his own with the best of them, whether in business, in pol- itics, in the literary world, in oratory or in debate. "Abel?" Yes; an "abel" man (phonetic spelling brings out the sense.)
One of the first things a soldier must learn during actual warfare is not to flinch under fire. The same thing holds true in political warfare. The fellow standing on the "stump" firing his vocal musket at his hearers, who can withstand a return fire without finching, is the fellow who will win. Such a political soldier is little E. L. Abel. For this reason he makes an ideal campaigner. He can go into the heart of the enemy's country, open a political meeting as a Republican Evangel, parry off the fiery darts of putrid iniquity hurled at him by his assailants, and come out of the melee undisturbed in body, mind or spirit.
Abel is a lawyer by training, but a banker by profession. His legal training serves as a great help to him in business af- fairs,-not in getting out of trouble, but in keeping out. In discussing this matter in a letter to one of his friends (which mysteriously fell into our hands,) he said :
"I have found, however, that we cannot always follow our bent. If so, I would be at the bar in place of behind a bank counter. When I should have started to practice law I simply
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could not get away from the necessity, and that immediate, of getting bread and butter to fill the mouths of a wife and baby, and I had not the nerve to risk their welfare upon my ability, knowing that they would suffer if I should fail to make good as a diciple of Blackstone in action."
Illinois gave birth to Mr. Abel at Springfield, thirteen days after Abe Lincoln's elec- tion to the presidency in 1860. Having spent his boyhood dur- ing those strenuous days he became innoculated with a spirit of loyalty and patriot- ism that has lasted him through life.
His education was ac- quired in the city schools at Springfiled, in the University at Carbondale, Illinois, and in the hard school of experience. Like many others he started out in life as a country school teacher, and like thousands of others have done, he used the teaching profession merely as a stepping stone to something better. During his odd mo- ments he read law, and in 1884 he was admitted to the Illinois bar. elected city attorney.
E. L. ABEL The next year he was
ADOPTED BY SOUTH DAKOTA
Tired of "down east" methods and believing that the "golden west" held greater opportunities for a young man, Mr. Abel "pulled stakes" in 1887 and struck west. He settled at Bridge- water, S. D., and engaged in banking and in the practice of law. "Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them," said an old sage long ago. Abel belongs to the latter class. Peculiarly enough, he has never been an office seeker, but since coming to this state, he has been almost constantly an office holder. Offices of various kinds have been clinging to his political skirts like a bull-pup to a bone.
At Bridgewater they made him alderman, then mayor, and they kept him on the board of education for twelve consecutive.
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years. Governor Mellette appointed him trustee of the Sioux Falls penitentiary in 1888. In 1902 McCook county sent him to the legislature as state senator, and in 1904 they returned him with an overwhelming majority. For awhile he edited the Salem Pioneer Register. Then in 1905 he removed to Huron, and two years later he established the City National Bank at that place and became its president. Last year he was elected president of the board of trustees of Huron College.
While in the state senate, Abel was a power for good. He helped to shape our oil inspection law which has since been cop- ied by ten other states. He introduced and steered through the senate an anti-trust law that was a model. Corporations rushed on their lobbyists and defeated it in the house.
MANY SIDED FELLOW
It will readily be seen that Abel is a many sided fellow, a symmetrical man, if you please. We have already detected him to be a teacher, lawyer, banker, politician, and state-man. But this is not all, he is also an orator and a poet. Abel is one of the happiest combinations of literary ability and business instinct that we have ever had in the state. He has delivered the great- est number of addresses on the greatest variety of subjects of any man in South Dakota.
His addresses are all literary jewels, clad in garlands of rhetoric, studded with diamonds of speech, and they sparkle and glitter with a polished diction that is soul-entrancing. We have before us at this time such a large collection of them that we feel at a loss, and utterly incompetent, to select for publication herein any one of them or any part of the same. Again it is scarcely necessary, for he has spoken during the past twenty- three years in every town of any size in the state.
His style can readily be caught, however, from a couple paragraphs taken from his Memorial address before the Elk's Lodge:
"The great inission of our order is to bring men nearer to each other and to develop more completely the brotherhood of man. Fraternalizing human hearts is the greatest and most im- portant duty each of us is called upon to perform, for love weaves into life the woof and warp of happiness, without which the heart is as barren as a dessert.
"The perfume of the flowers we place upon a brothers' coffin cannot reach back and bring solace to his troubled hours while
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yet he trod the troubled path of life, and the tears we shed upon his grave can never heal the wounds we made in life upon his tortured heart.
"Let us place our flowers upon the graves of our departed brothers, and mingle with them our sorrowing tears to give ex- pression to our grief ; but while life lasts let us not forget to give each other every day the beautiful flowers of brotherly love and kindness, then when the cord of life is cut and some brother falls into that sleep from which no awakening comes, we can stand be- side the grave and place our flowers upon the coffin which holds his lifeless form, with a serene feeling of satisfaction in the fact that our floral offerings are but the emblem of those we gave while he was still our cherished companion in the pilgrimage of life."
The heart and character and brotherly devotion of the man are amply set forth in the above paragraphs. But we dare not close without giving to our readers one of his beautiful, patriotic, inspiring poems. It should be reproduced by every newspaper in the state, and be published in our school readers.
KNOW YE THE LAND?
Know ye the land where the blue joint doth flourish, And cattle on prairies grow heavy with fat; Where the white-coated sheep in winter do nourish The grasses which cover the earth like a mat;
Where the growing of wheat brings the gold from the east, Where people ne'er hunger but are ever at feast; Where the owner of sheep has a fortune in sight, And hard times are past while the future is bright; Where potatoes, rye, barley and long-headed oats Make the farmer's life easy in the raising of shoats; Where the cow's golden butter and the fruit of the hen Are the products which bring such large fortunes to men; Where the country is blessed with the richest of soil, And bountiful harvests reward man for his toil; Where bright gold and silver in profusion abound And beautiful jasper for building is found;
Where churches in plenty raise toward heaven their spires And schools in great numbers furnish learning's desires; Where the song of the plow boy is heard early at morn As he goes forth to till the broad acres of corn;
Where the maid's rosy cheeks are the youth's wild delight While their beautiful eyes shine like stars of the night; Where matrons meet age with faces so fair
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That they seem ever youthful, though silvered their hair ; Where Hygeia's blessings are showered upon all And summer keeps smiling until late in the fall; Where winters are short and soon melt into spring; Where the harvest is crowned by Mondamin, the king; Where the flower of its youth to rescue suffering afar, Promptly respond to the call of the nation to war? Know ye he land? 'Tis the land which we love, Which hath been bountifully blessed by the Father above; 'Tis our fair South Dakota which nature has blest,
Affording humanity a place of sweet rest;
And today she invites the proud sons of the East To sit at her tables and partake of her feast.
(Later. - Since the above was written, Mr. Abel has been nominated and elected Lieutenant-Governor of South Dakota; and, at the time of going to press his political star is greatly in the ascendency.)
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THE STATE'S RIPEST SCHOLAR
The Roosevelt of Dakota Wesleyan University -- that round- headed, enduring, philosophical, substantial educator, Dr. Samuel Weir. How the institution with which he is identified has learned to love him, the state at large to revere him, and the educational and theological fraternities of the whole nation to hearken to his learned advice.
Dr. Weir was born at London, Middlesex county, Province of Ontario, Canada, three days after the firing on Fort Sumpter at the inception of the Civil War.
His early education was acquired in the public schools of his native province and in the provincial normal school. It is fre- quently said of a man, "He has been given all that the schools of this country afford." More than that may be said for Weir; he has been given all that the schools of two continents afford He finished his course at Garret Biblical Institute in 1887, receiving his B. D. degree. Two years later he received his A. B., from Northwestern; and in 1891, Illinois Wesleyan honored him with his Master's degree. Later he studied for one year in Boston University. Still dissatisfied with his preparation, he went abroad for study and travel. Plunging at once into the weighty philosophical course in the famous university of Jena, into its classic library of 200,000 volumes, into its 100,000 dissertations, into its 900 volumes of ancient manuscripts, he came forth in 1895 as a finished product of the school, and was honored with his Ph. D. degree, "summa cum laude," a distinction never be- fore accorded to any foreigner under the sun. He also did some work at the University of Leipsic.
EXPERIENCE
Applying a man's education becomes his experience. If he is alert, absorbs from his surroundings and applies well the theory gained, his experience soon becomes the most valuable part of his education. No man can long tread water in the current of life.
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He may presume he is merely standing still, resting, but shortly he will observe that the shore line opposite him is much nearer the falls than it was when he first ceased to struggle. Dr. Weir has never ceased the battle. His constant struggle onward and upward in the experience of life has broadened his education more than did his acade nic preparation. After graduating from the normal school in hisnative province, he removed to Michigan in 1884 and joined the Detroit conference of the M. E. church. This experience gave rise to his ambition to finish his education. After his graduation from Northwestern in 1889, he accepted the position of professor of Latin an'l Greek in the Southwest Kansas College. A year later he was called to the pastorate of St. Paul's chuch, Wichita, Kansas, and before another year had passed he was elected to the First church, Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Dr. Weir had been married in 1889 to Miss Caroline Voss. The altitude at Cheyenne so greatly affected her health that at the close of his first year of pastoral work at that place, he was compelled to resign and seek a new field Accordingly he ac- cepted a temporary appointment as instructor in mathematics, Northwestern University. From there he went to Boston to study, and from the latter place to Germany.
Upon his return to America in the summer of 1895, after his graduation at Jena, he was elected professor of ethics in the school of pedagogy, University of New York, and professor of philosophy, graduate school of the same institution. He held these two positions for six years, and then resigned voluntarily, because he could not conscientiously endorse the administration of the school. The next year he spent as lecturer on education, University of Cincinnati. The next two years were spent as prin- cipal of the state normal school, Clarion, Pennsylvania, and the school year 1904-5 was utilized by him as honorary fellow, Clark University.
In 1905 he was called by Dr. Thomas Nicholson, at that time president of Dakota Wesleyan University, at Mitchell, S. D., to organize the school of education of that institution. In January, following, he was elected vice president of the university and dean of the school of education, and entrusted largely with its educational administration. When Dr. Nicholson resigned, two years since. Dr. Weir was approached by a member of the board of trustees of the school, with a view to elevatiing him to the presidency. He declined it. A few weeks later, he was offered the deanship of the school of theology, University of Chattanooga. This he also declined.
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ABLE SCHOLAR
When the fleecy-winged angel of life gently laid Baby Weir into his mother's lap, it gave to the world a thinker-a thinker, if you please, of the Emersonian style. A half century has passed by since Wilson wrote those immortal words:
"Think for thyself! One good idea, But known to be thine own.
Is better than a thousand gleaned From fields by others sown."
This is Dr. Weir's
creed. Original thought is his hobby. He does his own thinking; he in- spires his students to think.
His extensive prep- aration, coupled with his broad successful exper- ience, has made him eas- ily the ripest scholar in the state. As a student at Northwestern, he won the Gage debating prize; at Jena he was honored as no other American has ever been. Professor Woodburn, principal of the training school, N. N. I. S., Aberdeen, S. D., who took some work in philosophy under Dr. Weir during summer school at the D. W. U., a few years since, said to the writer, "I didn't suppose we had a man like him in the state."
DR. SAMUEL WEIR
RELATION OF TEACHER AND STUDENT
The success of any undertaking must be determined by the results.
Success is measured in achievement and not in dreams. Grant's tunneling under Richmond, although admirably conceived. was not a success, on account of its disastrous result; while the carrying of Missionary Ridge by his troops during the campaign
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about Chatanooga, was a pre-eminent success, although not con- ceived at all.
This principle holds true in all walks of life, especially in the teaching profession. The scholarship possessed by the stud- ents turned out by a teacher is the best evidence of his success or failure as an instructor. As President Cook of the Spearfish Nor- mal, with pardonable pride, points to the world-renowned Mayo Bros , surgeons at Rochester, Minnesota, as old students of his, so Samuel Weir, in taking a retrospect of his own life, finds con- solation in the living evidences of his success manifested by those who as students under his Socratic instruction, are today filling positions of honor and trust. Among these are Bishop Anderson of the M. E. churh; also Rev. Kirk Robbins, Greencastle, Indiana, successor to Dr. Hoagland, of Mitchell; Professor Karp of Syracuse University, and from fifteen to twenty others who have become noted. Among his students in philosophy, while profes- sor in the University of New York, were representatives of the Episcopal, the Presbyterian, the Methodist, the Congregational, the Baptist and the Evangelical Lutheran ministry. He also trained two Catholic priests, and a Jewish lady who has since won distinction as an author.
The kindly esteen in which Dr. Weir is held by the alumni of Dakota Wesleyan was ably voiced in the large number of let- ters which he received from then this year on the anniversary of his birthday, April 15. These canie from students of his scat- tered all over the world, including one from Ethel Shepherd- Carhart, Concepcion, Chili. The latter, in addition to its ex- pressed reverence for the doctor and its unreserved, outspoken appreciation of the influence of his life over hers, by reason of their classroomn contact, is, within itself, a literary classic. It merits publication in full, but space forbids. The letters are all gems and they evidently impressed the Doctor with the fact that "It is not all of life to live, nor all of death to die."
These young people write touchingly of the help received from their loyal, philosophical instructor. Well they may. Here is a case that illustrates his work: When Dr. Weir was instructor in mathematis, Northwestern University, Samuel Merwin, the present editor of the "Success Magazine." and of " The National Post," was a student in the institution. Although brilliant along literary lines, he was dreadfully poor in mathematics. It became evident that he was not going to be able to graduate. Where- upon Dr. Weir took hin under his tutorage, in personal interest and as a special favor, with the result that Merwin graduated with honor; and today he is ably filling his mission on earth in the editorial world.
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EDITOR
Dr. Weir is the author of "Christianity as a Factor in Civ- ilization" (1893). He is also the contributor of numerous weighty magazine articles, and for the past four years, in addi- tion to his heavy work, he has ably edited the department of education in the Sioux Falls Daily Argus-Leader. His diction, although not flowery and imaginative, is vigorous, compact, pol- ished and inviting. He furnishes practically as much original matter each week as do the editors of either of the state educa- tional journals each month. They supply subject matter for ten issues: he supplies it for fifty-two.
CONCLUSION
Mrs. Weir died many years ago, leaving to her husband as a comforting heritage, a talented baby girl who will this year graduate from Northwestern University.
On June 2, 1897, Dr. Weir re.married-the second Mrs. Weir being Miss Sarah Richards of Aurora. Illinois. She is a talented and accomplished musician, and at present one of the vocal instructors at D. W. U. In her birthday letter to Dr. Weir Mrs. Carhart refers to his wife as follows:
"Scarcely less of a help and inspiration to me than yourself, has been, and is, the woman who is queen of your home. Among all the women in Mitchell, to me she is the most splendid em- hodiment of culture and grace and beauty."
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