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BIOGRAPHIES
Source:
1798
History of Geauga and Lake Counties, Ohio
with Illustrations
and Biographical Sketches of its Pioneers Most Prominent Men
Philadelphia - Williams Brothers
1878
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Residence of C. L. Tainter,
Claridon Tp.,
Geauga Co., O.
T. Tainter
Mrs. T. Tainter.
C. L. Tainter,
Mrs. C. L. Tainter |
TIMOTHY TAINTER
is the eighth of a family of nine children of Deacon Jonathan and
Jemima (Root) Tainter, of Somers, Tolland county, Connecticut.
He was born Apr. 5, 1796. His father died when the subject of this
notice was but a few years old. At the age of six he went into the
family of William Cook (his guardian), of Somers, where he
remained until he was fifteen. Soon after he was bound to John
Hunt, of the same place, to learn the blacksmith trade.
With him he came to Ohio in 1815, locating in Chardon, and remained with
him two years. In February, 1818, he married Lois Peck,
from Massachusetts. She died in May of the following year, leaving
a daughter, Cordelia, born Apr. 5, 1819, who be came the wife of
Orris Newcomb. In February, 1821, he married his
second wife, Jemima Allen, daughter of Elijah and
Jemima Pease Allen, also from Massachusetts. In 1824 he built
a saw-mill in Chardon, and carried on that business for fourteen years,
when he sold, and purchased a farm, which he occupied seven years, and
then exchanged for property in Pennsylvania, where he carried on a farm
and a public-house at the same time for a period of six years. He
then sold and returned to Ohio, purchasing a farm near the north line of
Claridon, known as “the Root place," which farm he still owns. He
resided here a year, when, leaving Mrs. Tainter with their
son-in-law, Orris Newcomb, he shouldered his rifle, and
betook himself to the woods in pursuit of game. He has always been
extremely fond of hunting, and has lived for months alone in the
wilderness, killing deer, trapping bear, and the various fur animals.
His house, when engaged in his favorite sport, was a cabin made of
brush, with hemlock bark for a bed. His bill of fare, while not of
great variety, was at least wholesome. It consisted of venison,
usually, and a little corn bread “wet-up” with water and baked on a
chip. This kind of life would seem to be anything but agreeable to
the present generation, but to him exposure was health.
The children of Mr. Tainter’s second
marriage were the following: Lovern, born November, 1821;
Charles L., Feb. 18, 1825, and Orvil E., June 16, 1827.
The daughter married Eber Brown, of Bradford,
Pennsylvania, and now lives in Montville. Charles L.
married Orra Ann Newcomb, of Parkman. One
child was born, and the mother subsequently died, and Mr.
Tainter married May 3, 1857, Nancy Young, also
of Parkman, and by this marriage has one ehild, - Orra.
Orvil is supposed to have died at sea. The
farm of Charles Tainter, with whom the parents reside,
consists of ninety-seven acres, and is situated on the road a short
distance south of the infirmary.
Source: History of
Geauga and Lake Counties, Ohio - Publ. Philadelphia, Williams Brothers -
1878 - Pg. |
Hon. Lester Taylor |
HON. LESTER TAYLOR.
Born Aug. 5, 1798, few lives comparatively have been so long; certainly
in the varied usefulness of an active man of a fine practical ability,
unusual public spirit, wide experience, and large intelligence, devoted
more to general and public affairs, and the advance of the whole than to
private gain and aggrandizement, very few in Geauga County have
approached it. For the later years Mr. Taylor has
quite given his time and unimpaired faculties to various causes of
enlightened neighborhood, township, and county improvement; the
collection, collation, and preservation of the history of the county;
and to other causes which absorb his time, trench on his means, and
return to him no vulgar rewards whatever. I have been familiar
with this long, useful, and unselfish life, the example and lesson of
which should be preserved, and I turn to the three or four pages of
data, a dry outline without breadth or color, as if the hand that
furnished did so grudgingly, and feel that my labor must be less
fruitful than I could wish. Especially I would have known more of
the subjects, measures, and bills brought to the attention of the
legislative bodies of which Mr. Taylor was a conspicuous
member, and the condition and needs of the time.
The Taylors must have been of a good, vigorous
race in their Connecticut antecedents, of which I have not a word.
Horace, the elder brother, was a public-spirited man, and built
an academy at the centre of Claridon, and on a less extended field lived
a life of practical usefulness like his brother.
The family, by New England thrift, was well-to-do.
This, to the newer generation of the Western Reserve, furnishes the idea
of rich lands, abundant harvests, fat cattle, and easy lives, but which,
in fact, was a steady, unrelenting struggle, almost a war, with a hard,
sterile soil, a rigorous climate, and unkindly surroundings, for what,
to the easy-going, well-off farmer of Geauga, was a meagre, thankless
return, compelling a study and practice of all the small economies in
order to make the least advance in acquisition, and the slow, almost
imperceptible gains of even the most successful New England farming
family.
Of such Mr. Taylor was a son. He
received a good common-school education. His parents were never
able to send him to an academy, that hope and ambition of the aspiring
youth of his day.
The common school of that time was a totally different
institution from the schools of to-day. A course in the Chardon
high school of today is a better and much more useful course than Yale
or Harvard furnished at the day of his birth. He began with
Dilworth’s arithmetic and ended with Daboll; a small
abridgment of Murray’s grammar came in late. In geography,
a book of questions and answers - a map, not to speak of an atlas - was
then unheard of in a country school, and yet with those meagre, scanty
helps were formed the intelligent, sinewy, fibrous minds of that time,
which did not grow up indolent in the fatness and abundance of easy
means of learning, but were hungry, craving, and unsatisfied. He
never attended a summer school after he was ten. At eighteen he
taught school, as did Garfield and Ludlow, though such
cases were rare.
Hartland, the town of his nativity, had an abundance of
good air and fine scenery, was rough, hilly, rocky, and had plenty of
good water. It was not a bad place to raise children. The
hardy and enterprising usually left it as soon after reaching years of
discretion as parents permitted. One would hardly remain there later.
Lester went at twenty and joined Horace
in the still abundant woods of Claridon. Notwithstanding his hardy
rearing, young Taylor had reached early manhood with a slender
constitution and slight strength, compared with most of the robust
pioneers. He went on to the farm where he now lives, then
beautiful forest slopes, and struck the first of the incessant blows
which changed it with time to the beautiful present. When he left
Hartland he left his troth with sweet Mary Wilder, and it
was to make a home for her that he journeyed and toiled three years,
cleared the home fields, built his cabin, and set rose-trees about it,
and in 1821 he visited Connecticut, married, and carried her to the new
Claridon residence.
From the first he taught school in the winters.
In 1819 he “kept” a four months school in Mentor, and the surviving
pupils gave him a famous reunion a few years since. The year of
his marriage Claridon celebrated the 4th. Mr. Taylor
was the “young Demosthenes," and a blunderbuss of good Queen
Ann’s time, a “queen’s-arm,” was the artillery of the occasion.
In 1824 the log cabin, the homestead, was consumed by
fire, with quite all its contents-a calamity for any time, a great one
then and to them.
Mr. Taylor early organized a literary
club and debating society, and Claridon has seldom been without one
since. He had decided to be a farmer, and an intelligent one-not
merely to plant and grub, but understand, study, sympathize with all the
processes involved, and be enabled to conduct farming with intelligence
and profit, and derive from it something of the higher pleasures of
science and observation as well as that of gain. He became a
subscriber to the New England Farmer, and extended his patronage to
other agricultural journals as they sprang up. He began also to
buy and collect books as occasion and means permitted, which in time
became quite as extensive a library as any to be found in the county.
He early turned his own and the attention of his neighbors and friends
to the uses and beauties of tree-planting and culture about the houses,
lawns, yards, highways, and public places; is to be regarded as the
pioneer in this, and was quite the first to discover and make available
for this purpose the rare qualities of our native trees, the elm and
maple. His own beautiful farm, and Claridon generally, bear ample
evidence to his fidelity to an early matured taste for arboriculture.
His early devotion to the cause of a thorough
common-school education was marked and practical, wisely judging that in
this field was the mission of the American educator. At an early
day it was the duty of the courts to appoint examiners of teachers, and
Mr. Taylor was one of the earliest, with William L.
Perkins and others, in the county. At an early day his then
fine, erect, soldierly person attracted the attention of Colonel C.
C. Paine, - all that family were colonels and generals, - and he
appointed him adjutant of his regiment. Such was his popularity
that the commissioned officers of the regiment, with whom it lay, not
long after elected him to command them, and the title of colonel, thus
acquired, only yielded to that of judge afterwards.
As is generally known, the Western Reserve had received
for school purposes a large grant of government lands situate in
Tuscarawas and adjoining counties, all in the State. It became
necessary to utilize the proceeds of them, as well as to open them to
settlers and permit the country to be improved; and in 1830 an act was
passed for this purpose, which required that they should be appraised.
Mr. Taylor was appointed to this responsible duty, in
company with Amos Seward, of Portage, and Ahaz Merchant,
of Cleveland. These lands, aggregating sixty thousand acres, were
not to be sold for less than the appraised value, although, if not sold
within the time specified, were to be offered at public sale. The
proceeds were the foundation of the common-school fund for the Western
Reserve. That Mr. Taylor executed this duty with
fidelity needs no assurance.
Mr. Taylor was elected to represent
Geauga County in the general assembly of Ohio, and re-elected, - the
first for the session of 1832-33, and the second for 1834-35. I
think these elections were by the anti-Masons, who then embodied much of
the active intelligence of the county, and the last time he and
Seabury Ford were probably rival candidates. However it was,
the people of Geauga have always had a serious purpose in the elections
of representatives.
None of the second generation of men remember the State
politics of those years. We know there were threats of awful war
by Governor Mason, the territorial governor of Michigan,
about a strip of land, on which stood the then small town of Toledo.
The people of that region, in May, 1835, assembled in convention and
formed a State constitution, with a boundary so liberal as to include
Maumee bay, the mouth of the river, Toledo, and a wide strip of Ohio;
and Governor Mason, then quite twenty-one years of age,
assembled his forces, with a proclamation, at Monroe, which some people
in Ohio then supposed to be a stout headed, malicious old man, instead
of a town, who was setting the young cockerel up to this mischief, and
who marched toward Toledo with bloody intent. Good old Robert
Lucas, Democratic governor of Ohio, convened the Ohio legislature
by proclamation as stout as that of the governor of all Michigan, and
Colonel Taylor was of those who responded. Governor
Lucas called for volunteers finally, and some of us boys offered to
go, but were never mustered. It made a national commotion,
however, and John Quincy Adams, who had a capacity for being
wrong-headed, stood with “ that old Monroe,” egging on Governor
Mason. Congress finally offered to admit Michigan if she
would relinquish her claim to Ohio, and take the upper peninsula
instead, a wide wild region north of Mackinaw, between Lakes Superior
and Michigan. She refused in 1836, and accepted in 1837. Colonel
Taylor, who had a hand in holding Ohio quiet during this
excitement, could have told us all about his part of it.
Time elapsed, and in 1846 he was elected one of the
associate judges of Geauga County, with Judge Aiken and
Judge Converse, which made a very respectable court of
itself. Judge Taylor had in his younger days often
appeared in the magistrates’ courts and before arbitrators, had presided
as justice of the peace for many years, had read some of the elementary
books, and, with his quick accurate apprehension of things and the
respect entertained for him and his associates by the bar, he made a
very good presiding judge. Under the old constitution, many powers
and duties more municipal than judicial devolved on the associate
judges. This place he filled until the change of the judiciary
under the new State constitution in 1851.
In politics Mr. Taylor was a Whig of the
Giddings and Frank Wade school, which, with
a few notable exceptions, was the Geauga type. With the most of
these he became a Free-Soiler in 1848. In 1854 he was elected by them
again to the House, where, with the memory of his former service, he at
once took a high position.
In 1856 he was elected to the Senate by the counties of
Ashtabula, Geauga, and Lake. These were the years of Tom
Ford as lieutenant-governor, who was never in the chair, the only
real service he could render; and it was one of those “nevers" that was
much better than late or even early. Judge Taylor
was elected president pro tem., and presided at the opening ceremonies
of taking possession of the Senate chamber in the famous new State
capitol, and generally during his senatorial term was regarded as one of
the best presiding officers of that body. During these years
Judge Taylor was justly regarded throughout the State as one
of its most able and faithful legislators.
Reared with a profound respect for New England
orthodoxy, Judge Taylor gave his enlightened assent to the
general soundness of its faith more than fifty years ago. He
carries his warm vitality, and is carried by it, into all things which
he deems worthy his concern. He would necessarily be of the
new-school wing, and could not fail of being one of its representative
men; was of the Lake and Geauga church conferences for twenty years, and
chosen by conference to represent it in the first national council of
the Congregational churches at Boston, in 1865. Also in the
national council at Detroit, in 1857.
Judge Taylor was largely instrumental in
the formation of the Geauga Historical Society, in 1875. Upon its
organization he became its president, and has continued at its head to
the present time. He has devoted much time to traveling about and
holding pioneer meetings in the various townships, delivering addresses,
looking up the surviving settlers, stimulating the interest of all
classes in the general subject, gathering material, and securing the
selection in each of the townships of a competent person to write its
history, and has urged them to such diligence that the society has felt
itself authorized to canvass for a cheap edition of its undoubtedly
valuable collections. He has taken a lively interest in our work,
contributed whatever was in his reach, and deplores the action of his
association, which precluded our use of its gatherings.*
Judge Taylor was one of the most active
promoters of the organization of the Claridon Farmers’ Club, instituted
some twenty years ago, which has had his steady and warm support to the
present time. At the recent August reunion and festival of the
Claridon, Chardon, and Hambden clubs, at the centre of Claridon, he
delivered a valuable extemporaneous address, full of practical wisdom,
the fruit of long experience and wide and varied observation, reading,
and reflection.
Prominent in all the social and so-called domestic
associations of his region, Judge Taylor, a few years
since, organized what is known as the “Central Park Association,” the
objects of which are to ornament the public grounds of the township,
create a taste for, and lead to, general arboriculture, and the laying
out and planting of lawns, yards, and grounds of private residences.
Judge Taylor early became a practical
speaker, with an easy flow of language and good manner, a thing so
useful, and to most Americans born so easy of acquisition, that one
wonders why so few intelligent and leading minds acquire the power.
Mr. Taylor’s mind is of a logical order. He has the
capacity, full capacity, of seeing and hearing, which so many lack, and
thus draws information
from what goes on about him, which he works into thought and ideas.
He is with out imagination, has little fancy, and perhaps less humor,
save of a grim sort. The mind is sound, practical. Kindly, a
just and liberal man, pure of spirit, and blameless of life, not greatly
seeking, giving more than he receives.
His Mary Wilder fell by the wayside many years
ago, after a true woman’s unselfish life. True heart, her husband
sought no other love. Sons and daughters she left. One devotes her
maiden life to him. A son, in a tasteful home, is just across the
way.
His homestead, one of the pleasantest situated in that
region, has a fine outlook down a gentle slope, westerly, into the sweet
vale of “Aquilla lake" and the western Cuyahoga. Here, with
faculties unimpaired, in the serene mellowness of ripe years, with the
softened rays of the “ westering sun” gilding his years, they will run
their serene and still luminous course.
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* All of them seem to deplore, and the strange thing is that
all together seem unequalto getting out of, their own unfortunate
action.
Source: History of Geauga and Lake Counties, Ohio
- Publ. Philadelphia, Williams Brothers - 1878 - Pg. 84 |
A.H. Thrasher |
ARTHUR HENRY THRASHER
Source: History of Geauga and Lake Counties, Ohio - Publ.
Philadelphia, Williams Brothers - 1878 - Pg. 97
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A. L. TINKER. We have
been unable to obtain the data with which to prepare this gentleman's
biography; and all we can say is that he stands confessedly at the head
of the bar of his own county, and is regarded as one of the foremost
lawyers in northern Ohio. His field of practice is very extensive.
His wife is the eldest daughter of John A. Ford, formerly of
Burton.
Source: History of Geauga and Lake Counties, Ohio - Publ.
Philadelphia, Williams Brothers - 1878 - Pg. 92
SHARON WICK'S NOTES:
1850 Census - Madison, Lake Co., OH dated July 15, 1850 shows the
following:
Dwelling 3 Family 3 - A. P. Tinker, 29 M W - Lawyer - $500 - b. OH
Martha Tinker 21 F W b. OH
John Tinker 2 M W b. OH
-----
1860 Census - Painesville Village, Lake Co., OH on July 19, 1860 - P. O.
Painesville
Dwelling 1425 Family 1403
Alva L. Tinker 38 M Lawyer RE$6000
Pers$2500 b. OH
Martha E. Tinker 31 F
b. OH
John A. Tinker 12 M
b. OH
Ford Tinker 6 M
b. OH
Ara Tinker
3 M
b. OH
Rosalia E. Booth 28 F
Pers$1200 b. OH
Minerva Hayward 34 M Servant
b. OH
Source Citation
Year: 1860;
Census Place: Painesville,
Lake, Ohio; Roll: M653_996;
Page: 430;
Image: 400;
Family History Library Film: 803996
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1870 Census - Town of Painesville, Lake Co., OH on June 17, 1870 -
P. O. Painesville, O
Dwelling 411 Family 411
Tinker, Alvin L. 48 M W Pros. Attorney
b. OH
Tinker, Martha E. 40 F W Keeps house
b. OH
Tinker, Ford D. 17 M W At school
b. OH
Tinker, Ara
12 M W " "
b. OH
-----
1880 Census - Painesville City, Lake Co., OH on June 7, 1880
16 Prospect Street - Dwelling 155 Family 163
Tinker, Albert L. W M 60 Lawyer -
b. OH Fath. b. Conn Moth. b. Conn.
Tinker, Martha W F
50 Wife - Keeping house b. OH Fath. b. Conn
Moth. b. Conn.
Tinker, Ford W M 24
Son - Miller
b. OH Fath. b. OH Moth. b. OH
McCormick, Lizz? W F 24 Servant Single
b. Ohio
Roll: 1038;
Family History Film: 1255038;
Page: 412C;
Enumeration District: 087;
Image: 0827
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A. L. Tinker, died aged 68 yrs - Birth date: ca. 1822 - Death
Date: 10 Jan. 1890 - Death Place: Painesville, Lake Co., OH - Vol. I
Page 174 No. 59 |
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