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BIOGRAPHIES
Source
Centennial Biographical History of Richland Co., Ohio
Illustrated
By A. J. Baughman, Editor
Published Chicago - The Lewis Publishing Co.
1901
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CHARLES W. FRENCH was born
on a farm beside what is now known as the southern division of
the Lake Shore road, near Wakeman, Huron county, Ohio, Sept. 2,
1862. His progenitors on the side of both father and
mother were of Connecticut stock, and it is not known for how
many generations they had lived in America.
The eldest son of parents who were indebted for much of
the purchase price of their farm, he cheerfully assumed a share
of their burden of toil while yet a child. At the age of
eleven years he loaded and stacked forty-four acres of grain,
his father pitching both ways. He was patient and careful
in his work. He was kind to domestic animals and pets,
with all of which he was a welcome playfellow. He would
sometimes work in summer with as many as three chipmunks playing
about him, each one ready to scamper into his pockets if
alarmed. A fine, yet spirited, young horse used to carry
him on errands to the village at a dead gallop without so much
as a rope on. He was deeply attached to his mother, who
died just before he was fourteen years old, and to a few other
good women with whom he came in contact in childhood.
Their influence has survived the shock of nearly a score of
eventful years. Neither liquor, tobacco nor profanity has
he ever indulged in. He scorned the so called lighter
follies of youth. A reverence for womanhood has always
been one of the strongest traits of his character. There
has not been anything in his private life from which a good
woman would need to shrink or a little child should avoid.
This was not so much because he resisted allurement of evil, to
which, in fact, he never paid serious attention, as it was that
he yielded to a craving for the good.
His opportunities for attending school were limited to
a rural district and later a village high school. After he
was ten years old he did not attend school in summer, and did
not average quite sixty-days per year in school from the age of
ten to that of nineteen, after which he attended no school
whatever.
To a misfortune that clouded his early years he is
indebted in a large measure for a mental training that widely
influenced his later life. As a child he was frail in body
and shy in spirit, naturally diffident to a painful degree.
He was born a stammerer and so seriously was he thus afflicted
that it was often difficult to understand his attempted speech.
The usual fellowships of childhood were therefore shunned by
him. He was not without compensation. He had access
to a good library. Early driven by the wounds to which a
sensitive spirit was ever exposed to the society of his own
thoughts and the fellowship of his own mind, the history of the
world was his playground, its episodes his toys. The
senate of Rome, the assemblies of France, the parliaments of
England and the congress of the United States had much more to
do with forming his character than did either the precepts of
his elders or the examples of his fellows. He delved into
the lore of ancient Greece, southern Asia and all vanished
peoples. He marched with the legions of Rome from the
Euphrates to Gibraltar. He cried himself to sleep over teh
ruin of the Roman empire. He paced the corridors of the
great hall, watching the growth of that spirit of personal
liberty which is the crowning glory of the Anglo-Saxon. He
walked the aisles of the great abbey, musing upon the record of
generations that have made our race illustrious forevermore.
Thus a shy, nervous boy, dressed in home-made clothes, grew up
under the shadow of characters that have ennobled human life in
all ages.
As a youth he had almost no social life. His
attempts to make the acquaintance of other young people usually
resulted painfully to him. An incident of his childhood
will illustrate the degree of misunderstanding to which he was
subjected when seeking social intercourse. At a revival in
a village church a woman who was a zealous worker approached him
with the query, "My boy, are you prepared for death?" With
grave simplicity this child, who had lived with the centuries,
stammered, "Yes, ma'am; I would be willing to die if I thought
that I could then talk with William of Orange for a few
minutes." The effect produced by this peculiar profession
of faith so abashed the boy that he fled from the church.
At the age of sixteen he began attending debating
societies in the school districts and villages of Huron county.
To his surprise, when addressing an audience the bonds of the
stammerer seemed to fall away from him. The faces before
him often appeared to fade away and in their place there
assembled about him the famous dead of all ages with whom he had
been familiar rather than with the living. As a public
speaker he attained some degree of success.
At the age of nineteen he began life for himself,
commencing with a job of cutting stove-wood in the winter of
1881-2. During most of the summer of 1882 he worked on a
farm. In the fall of that year he began blowing stumps
with dynamite. He rapidly became skillful in the use of
this explosive, of which little was then known. Within a
few months his operations extended over much of northeastern
Ohio. He introduced the use of dynamite in the stripping
of sandstone quarries and the working of limestone quarries in
northern Ohio and on the islands of Lake Erie. He engaged
in submarine work to some extent. He was always successful
in his calculations respecting the use of high explosives.
He sometimes fired single charges containing nearly a ton of
dynamite!
Lake of practical knowledge of men proved to be fatal
to his early business career. At the age of twenty-two he
failed for twenty thousand dollars. The assets then in his
possession, consisting of property, contracts and plans, would
have yielded a fortune had he then been able to control men as
well as he handled nitro-glycerin.
The result of this failure was to discredit him almost
entirely among ordinary people. The next few years of his
life were passed in a ceaseless struggle to regain such a
standing as would enable him to reduce to practicable operation
the industrial projects with which his mind was usually filled.
Repeated failures gave a somber hue to his mind but did not
crush his spirit. In the summer of 1881 he succeeded in
acquiring considerable property at Sandusky, Ohio. He
designed and built a novel barge for taking up reef rock in
submarine work. This apparatus cost seven thousand
dollars, and every sea captain who examined it declared it to be
an utter failure. It was a success, doing all that it had
been planned to do. He began the construction of a mill
for crushing limestone into rock ballast. This plant was
located about four miles south of Sandusky, on the Lake Erie
division of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, and before this mill
was completed he organized the Sandusky Stone Company, which
finished the plant and operated it for several years. It
was finally sold to the Lorain Steel Company and is now the
property of the United States Steel Trust.
In the spring of 1889 Mr. French and his
associates bought a tract of sandstone quarry land near Lucas,
Richland county, Ohio, and began the development of the same.
Nearly one hundred thousand dollars was expended upon this
property. In the winter of 1892-3 nearly all of the men
who were associated with Mr. French in this project
failed disastrously. The property was involved in a
tangled mass of litigation. It was finally sold and now
belongs to a corporation controlled by Mr. French.
On June 27, 1890, Mr. French was married to
Miss Alberta Walker, of Sandusky, Ohio. Miss
Walker's father had been at first a foreman for Mr.
French and afterward the superintendent for the Sandusky
Stone Company during the summer of 1888. He was killed by
an accidental explosion of dynamite in Sandusky, on Thanksgiving
day, 1888. At the time of her marriage Miss Walker
was the secretary of the Baker Stone Company, of which Mr.
French was then the president. Their domestic life has
been in the main a very happy one. One child, a son, died
at the age of four months. The mother and two younger
sisters of Mrs. French find a home with them. They
have taken three little girls, whom they are trying to train
into Christian womanhood. Mr. French's career is
greatly influenced by the peace and affection of his domestic
life.
In the summer of 1896 Mr. French began planning
the construction of a steam road to be used as a branch of the
Big Four, from Shelby to Mansfield, Ohio. This section of
road is now graded and ready for track-laying. The project
gradually grew until he finally undertook to create practically
a new system that should ink existing Vanderbilt lines by two
trans-Ohio divisions, through territory yielding a heavy
tonnage. He is now at the head of several railway
companies, holding Ohio charters, the Youngstown & Cleveland
Railway Company, the Richland & Mahoning Railway Company and the
Chicago Short Line Railway Company being the principal ones of
this combination of corporations. Including new roads to
be built and existing lines to be bought, he is projecting about
five hundred and fifty miles of main line road and perhaps two
hundred miles of belt lines. He has gathered about him an
official staff of capable men, all of whom work harmoniously to
a common end. The new system will reach from a point near
Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, to New Washington, Ohio; form
Youngstown to Delphos, Ohio; from Carey, Ohio, to Fort Wayne.
Indiana; from Youngstown to Cleveland, Ohio; and from New London
to Norwalk, Ohio. This system will link the Pittsburg &
Lake Erie Railroad, which is practically the Pittsburg terminal,
direct with the Lake Shore at Cleveland, with the Lake Shore at
Norwalk, and with the Nickel Plate at Fort Wayne, Indiana.
The southern division will pass through Salem, Alliance, Canton,
Massillon, Wooster, Mansfield and Shelby. The northern
division will pass through Youngstown and Akron.
Mr. French and his staff have succeeded in
interesting such support for this project as insures the
completion of the system. It may be extended after its
lines as now projected are finished.
At the age of thirty-nine it would seem that Mr.
French is destined to complete a work that will at least
leave a record of his career. In this private life he is
eager to add to the sum of human joys before earth shal have
passed. In his public career he is ambitious to do a man's
work while it is yet day.
Source #4: A Centennial Biographical History of Richland Co., Ohio
- Publ: Mansfield by A. A., Graham & Co. - 1901
- Page 664 |
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